Psych unit 4 discussion responses

1. My hypothesis would test whether or not Girl/Boy scouts helps kids grow into more well rounded teenagers/adults. With it being girl scout cookie season, I saw a logo on the back that says "G.I.R.L. go getter/innovator/risk-taker/leader and it makes me wonder if all the money spent to keep kids in these programs actually helps them. My hypothesis would be: A kid who is in the girl scouts or boy scouts is more successful than the general population who is not. The null hypothesis would be: Group A who is in these programs would not be more successful than group B who is not.  We would reject the null hypothesis at 5%, so any results of the boy or girl scouts z scores being higher than 1.64, the results are statistically significant. If lower, the results are inconclusive.

2. In a pipe manufacturing facility, the manager must ensure that the diameters of its pipes are equal to 5cm. The manager assumes the null hypothesis as "Population means of all the pipes equal to 5 cm.Since the facility needs to ensure that the pipes are not larger or smaller than 5 cm, the manager chooses the two-sided alternative hypothesis, which states that the population mean of all the pipes is not equal to 5 cm.The manager selects a significance level of 0.05, which is the most commonly used significance level.They collected a sample of pipes and measured their diameters.After performing the hypothesis test, the manager obtains a p-value of 0.004 which is less than the significance level of 0.05.The manager rejects the null hypothesis and comes to the conclusion that the mean diameter of all pipes is not equal to 5cm.

3. In this experiment, I would look at a population of high school students who were not given a pep talk before an exam and would sample a group of high school students who receive a pep talk before an exam. The research hypothesis would be that students who receive a pep talk before an exam will score higher than students who do not receive a pep talk. The null hypothesis would be that students who receive a pep talk before an exam are not likely to score any higher than students who do not receive a pep talk.  The significance value used will be 5%. The top 5% of scores from the normal curve table start at a z score of 1.64. If the sample z score is at or above 1.64, we could reject the null hypothesis and accept the research hypothesis that students who receive a pep talk before an exam score higher than students who do not receive a pep talk.

4. An experiment where I would expect a small difference between the experimental sample and the comparison distribution would have to do with eating breakfast before exams. The hypothesis would be: Students who eat breakfast before an exam score higher than students who don’t eat breakfast. Many studies have come out recently saying that breakfast was not all that it was cracked up to be. Reading these many studies has led me to the assumption that eating breakfast before an exam will not make that much of a difference from not eating breakfast before an exam. Conducting this experiment would help me to conclude whether or not breakfast before an exam is beneficial. The sample experiment would need to be extremely unlikely and the difference between the experimental sample and the comparison distribution would have to be very small in order for me to reject the null hypothesis. 

5. My hypothesis would be that my indoor cactus needs at least 4 hours of indirect sunlight to grow stronger.It is well known that plants cannot be exposed to direct sunlight because it can damage your plant. If we are in the sun too long we can dehydrate and get suburns. Indoor plants can be afftected by too much sun as well, even cactus plants. I have experienced this a few times by forgetting to move my cacti from the window sill, and being exposed to direct sunlight. Some were severly burnt. I thought It will be okay because they are cactuses and they are known for maximum direct sunlight in the desert, but no they will damage from too much sun exposure. I would have to see a major change more than once to reject the null hypothesis.