The authors of the paper “The Empowering (Super) Heroine? The Effects of Sexualized Female Characters in Superhero Films on Women” (Sex Roles [2015]: 211–220) were interested in the effect of watching movies that portrayed female heroines in roles that focus on their sex appeal on female viewers. They carried out an experiment in which female college students were assigned at random to one of two experimental groups. The 23 women in one group watched 13 minutes of scenes from the X-Men film series and then responded to a questionnaire designed to measure body esteem. Lower scores on this measure correspond to lower body satisfaction. The 29 women in the other group (the control group) did not watch any video prior to responding to the questionnaire measuring body esteem. For the women who watched the X-Men video, the mean body esteem score was 4.43 and the standard deviation was 1.02. For the women in the control group, the mean body esteem score was 5.08 and the standard deviation was 0.98. You may assume that the distribution of body esteem scores for each of the two treatments (video and control) is approximately normal.

a. Construct and interpret a 90% confidence interval for the difference in mean body esteem score for women who watch the video and those who do not.

b. Do you think that watching the video has an effect on body esteem? Explain.