Loneliness is a significant problem that affects many older Australians (aged 65 and over). There is evidence that being older is a strong predictor of loneliness, with a large proportion of Australians experiencing social isolation in their old age. This issue has only been exacerbated during COVID-19, where many older Australians have been required to physically isolate in order to protect themselves from the virus.

Loneliness can be detrimental to psychological and physical wellbeing. It is therefore considered a public health concern. Often, government bodies may turn to researchers in psychology for evidence-based initiatives that they can use to address such public health issues. Psychologists can use their expertise to help develop and assess targeted community interventions and programs.

Imagine you are a researcher who has been enlisted to design a community program to reduce loneliness in older Australians that can be delivered remotely. You know, from the literature, that social connection is key to reducing loneliness and improving wellbeing.

You devise aKeeping Connectedprogram where older Australians are paired with a young volunteer and given the opportunity to correspond daily with this volunteer. You believe that this opportunity for social connection will reduce loneliness. You think of three potential communication channels through which this program can be delivered-text messaging, phone calls, and video calls. You wonder whether any of these channels would be more effective than others.

You decide to run an experiment, administered over a period of one week, to provide a preliminary test of the relative effectiveness of these three communication channels in reducing loneliness in older Australian participants. You design your experiment to include four conditions:

Control condition: Participants do not receive any intervention over the course of one week.

Text condition: Participants are given the opportunity to chat with the volunteer through text message at any time over the course of one week.

Phone condition: Participants are given the opportunity to chat with the volunteer through a phone call for one hour each day over the course of one week.

Video condition: Participants are given the opportunity to chat with the volunteer through a video call for one hour each day over the course of one week.

Before 1. Participants in thecontrol conditionwill report greater loneliness than participants

collecting any data, you formulate three experimental hypotheses: in theother three conditions combined.

Participants in thetext conditionwill report greater loneliness than participants in thephone and video condition combined.

Participants in thephone conditionwill report greater loneliness than participants in thevideo condition.

Say you are only able to recruit 60 older Australians for your experiment, given your limited resources. You randomly assign these participants to one of the four experimental conditions, withn= 15 in each group. At the end of the week of the experiment, participants in all conditions a measure of their loneliness during the week:

The table below displays each participant's loneliness score by condition: Control Text Phone Video 8.00 7.00 1.00 9.00 7.00 9.00 4.00 6.00 8.00 7.00 3.00 8.00 9.00 8.00 3.00 6.00 8.00 8.00 2.00 7.00 5.00 3.00 7.00 8.00 7.00 6.00 2.00 2.00 9.00 2.00 6.00 4.00 5.00 8.00 5.00 8.00 9.00 6.00 1.00 6.00 7.00 7.00 2.00 2.00 7.00 1.00 7.00 6.00 3.00 4.00 5.00 4.00 4.00 9.00 1.00 5.00 9.00 8.00 2.00 6.00