CR: Left_Handed

Question

Please please, do not post an answer without supporting expln........


An author writing a book about left-handedness advertised in USA Today for people who
were left-handed. One-hundred people consented to be interviewed and assessed for certain personal-
ity traits. As the writer suspected, the interview results and personality assessments showed that Southpaws were more emotional and accident-prone than random samples of the general public. These findings support the conclusion that people are affected by their natural handedness.

Which one of the following selections, if true, points out the most critical weakness in the
method used by the author to investigate left-handed characteristics?

(A) Left-handed children are typically more emotional than their right-handed siblings.
(B) The interviews and assessments were performed by an outside firm, not by the author.
(C) People who saw the newspaper ad were not more likely to be left-handed than the number of Southpaws in the general population.
(D) The author's subsequent contact with people who were right-handed tended to reinforce his initial impression of the character traits of people who were not left-handed.
E) People who are not emotinoal and accident-prone were not as likely to respond to the author's newspaper ad nor were they as likely to agree to participate in the study.

wannab700 · Answer

E for me.

If people who are not emotional or accident prone are not likely to respond to the ad, they will not participate in the survey and hence the survey results will be biased.

pjreddy_rec · Answer

E for me too.

bono · Answer

(E) but I cannot explain why it is right. I've found it by eliminating all the other option choices:

(A) to narrow, we are not talking about children
(B) out of scope
(C) it tells us nothing, for me it is irrelevant
(D) again it does not talk about the stem

on these shaky grounds I made my answer choice :oops:

ranga41 · Answer

E, that will make the study group filled with emotinal and acciedent prone people.

rchadha · Answer

Ranga41,

Are we assuming that people who consented to participate in the survey knew that they were being surveyed that they are emotional and accident-prone? So then how would the sample of those 100 people only respond?

I'm confused!

heman154 · Answer

"One-hundred people consented to be interviewed and assessed for certain personality traits."

So, they would have atleast known that it was a personality test, since they consented to be assessed for it.

ranga41 · Answer

No we are not assuming that, if the statement 
 
E) People who are not emotinoal and accident-prone were not as likely to respond to the author's newspaper ad nor were they as likely to agree to participate in the study. 

is true, then people who respond to authors ad and participate in the study will be those who are emotional and accident prone, so the survey results will be skewed.

To make things simple, if you give an ad in a regular newspaper for left handed people to do a survey, once they come to the survey, you cannot conclude most left handed people are not blind, because only people who can see will read and new paper ad and hence come to survey. In this case if statement E is true only emotional and acciedent prone people will participate in the survey.

gotoknow3 · Answer

one more E

hkb555 · Answer

E for me. Same reason as ranga.

rchadha · Answer

Anyone has more explanations.........why E and not C?

CR: Left_Handed

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