A researcher is convinced that the reason that people watch

A researcher is convinced that the reason that people watch Jerry Springer (the talk show that parades the strange problems of highly disturbed people with highly disturbed relationships) is that it boosts their self-esteem temporarily because they compare their lives with those of Jerry\'s guests. To test this hypothesis, in random order 7 people watch two television shows. One show is an episode of Jerry Springer and the other show is a documentary on the K-12 education system that has been shown in previous research to have no impact on self-esteem. After each show, the participants in the study fill out a self esteem measure.

For each person, the data are presented below in form (x,y) in which x represents the self esteem measure after watching Jerry Springer and y represents the self-esteem measure after watching the other show.

(17,17), (21,25), (21,22), (22,21), (22,22), (17,20), (19,15)

The mean of the self esteem scores after watching Jerry Springer is 19.857, and the sample standard deviation is 2.193.

A. What is the obtained (computed) value of the test statistic that the researcher would compute to test her question (give the absolute value)?.

Solution

The matched pairs t test statistic is .43 with a p-value of .34. We would not reject the null hypothesis, and there is not sufficient evidence to say that watching Jerry Springer increases self esteem.