The experiment described suffers from at least one flaw in design. Identify the flaw and tell how the experiment can be improved.A researcher for a root beer brewery is interested in how people rate their diet root beer compared with their regular root beer. They conduct an experiment and obtain a sample of 100 people that drink root beer regularly. Each person is served a mug of diet root beer and a mug of regular root beer and they are asked to rate each on a scale of 1-10. Half of the participants are randomly chosen to drink the diet root beer first and half to drink the regular root beer first. The diet root beer and regular root beer is poured from the bottle in which it will be sold.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The tasters should not know which is diet and which is regular as this may influence their assessment. Both the diet and regular root beer should be poured from identical bottles. The person conducting the experiment should also not know which is diet and which is regular so that they will not inadvertently influence the participants. In other words the experiment should be double blind.