Some people claim that women can experience “mother hearing,” an increased sensitivity to and awareness of noises, in particular those of children. This special ability is often associated with being a mother, rather than simply with being female. Using hypothetical data, let’s put this idea to the test. Imagine we recruit women to come to a sleep experiment where they think they are evaluating the comfort of different mattresses. While they are asleep, we introduce noises to test the minimum volume needed for the women to be awakened by the noise. Here are the data in decibels (dB):

Mothers: 33, 55, 39, 41, 67

Nonmothers: 56, 48, 71

a. Conduct all six steps of an independent-samples t test. Be sure to label all six steps.

b. Report the statistics as you would in a journal article.

c. Calculate the 95% confidence interval.

d. State in your own words what we learn from this confidence interval.

e. Explain why interval estimates are better than point estimates.

f. Calculate the appropriate measure of effect size.

g. Based on Cohen’s conventions, is this a small, medium, or large effect size?

h. Why is it useful to have this information in addition to the results of a hypothesis test?