Managers at a large company heard that office employees who have plants around them are more productive than those who do not have plants around them. The managers selected 60 of their employees at random, where 30 of the employees were assigned at random to a control group that had no plants and 30 of the employees were assigned to a group that had plants placed around them. After several months, the managers took various metrics for productively and provided a score from 1 (lowest) to 100 (highest) to each employee. The sample mean score is 77.8 for the control group and 85.7 for the group with plants. Of 1,000 rerandomizations of the sample data, only 46 have a difference that is greater than or equal to 7.9 when subtracting the control group from the group with plants.

Question

Managers at a large company heard that office employees who have plants around them are more productive than those who do not have plants around them. The managers selected 60 of their employees at random, where 30 of the employees were assigned at random to a control group that had no plants and 30 of the employees were assigned to a group that had plants placed around them. After several months, the managers took various metrics for productively and provided a score from 1 (lowest) to 100 (highest) to each employee. The sample mean score is 77.8 for the control group and 85.7 for the group with plants. Of 1,000 rerandomizations of the sample data, only 46 have a difference that is greater than or equal to 7.9 when subtracting the control group from the group with plants.

Explain whether the results of this experiment suggest that placing plants near all national office employees improve their productivity.

A) Yes, because the results are significant. The managers used random selection as well as random assignment for their experiment. The employees selected are a random sample of all office employees.
B)No, even though the results are significant, the population of interest is the office employees at the company. The results can only apply to the office employees at the company.
C) No, although the managers used random assignment and random selection for their experiment, the results are not significant.
D)Yes, because the company is large and represents all office employees. The results are significant and can be applied to all office employees.

Answer 1

A) Yes, because the results are significant. The managers used random selection as well as random assignment for their experiment. The employees selected are a random sample of all office employees.