Question

Imagine that you are a scientist studying the effects of a new medication on the treatment of patients who get headaches. You separate all the patients into three groups. Group A is given 1 pill with a dose of 20 milligrams of medication once per day. Group B is given 1 pill with a dose of 40 milligrams of the medication once per day. Group C is given 1 pill that looks like the others but is really a sugar pill that contains no medication. The results: 20 percent of the people in Group A claimed that they got fewer headaches, while 80 percent of the people in Group B daimed that they had fewer headaches. Only 1 percent of people in Group C noticed a decrease in their headaches. What might you be able to conclude from this experiment? Explain by identifying the control, the dependent variable, and the independent variable in the experiment.

Answer 1

The control group is the group C, since they take sugar pills.

The dependent variable is the percentage of people that got fewer headaches.

The independent variables is the type of pills they gave to each of the groups.