Take-home final exam/assignment

1. Design a study to assess the effects of lead on IQ in school-aged children.

  a. What type of study would you use?

  b. Write up some hypothetical methods for recruiting subjects,
     collecting data, and analyzing results. (Please be concise.)

  c. Assume you want to be able to detect a 5-point drop in IQ and a
     standard deviation for IQ is 15 points. How many children would you
     need to recruit for your study? Be sure to also state what power you
     want to have to detect the 5-point difference.

  d. Are there any special ethical or Human Subjects considerations for
     the study you are designing?

2. In our default dataset, there are three factors (grp, Shades, and
   Ped) that might influence outcome (PLUC.post). Use SPSS to examine the
   effects of all three factors on PLUC.post. Describe the results of
   your analysis using graphs to plot means that illustrate any
   significant effects. If you do not have access to SPSS, please let us
   know.

3. In our default dataset, PLUC was measured both before and after the
   study. Was there any relationship between PLUC.pre (i.e., before the
   study began), and PLUC.post?

4. The measure LWAS was taken at the end of the study to see if there
   was any effect of the dietary supplement on that measure, independent
   of the effects of supplementation on PLUC. Please compare results for
   LWAS with those for PLUC with respect to the three experimental
   groups. What does this comparison tell you about the dietary
   supplements? For this problem, you could use either Excel or
   SPSS. Please include graphs of the means underlying significant
   effects.