Survey Methodology # 14 Form

Instructions and help about Survey Methodology # 14

Hi, I’m Adriene Hill and welcome back to Crash Course Statistics. In our last episode we talked about how we use experiments to imitate having two parallel universes to test things. But sometimes you can’t do certain experiments without becoming an all-powerful and evil dictator, and since it’s statistically unlikely that any of you are evil dictators, today, we’ll explore those methods. Like we mentioned at the beginning of the series, you’re not always able to answer the questions you really want to answer using statistics. For example, it would be great to experimentally test whether getting married increases your lifespan, but you can’t randomly assign some people to be married and force another group to be single. Not only would that be difficult to enforce, it would also be pretty unethical, though I suppose you being evil takes care of that particular concern. Similarly we can’t assign someone to be a twin, or a Democrat, or a smoker. But that doesn’t mean we sho