In each of the following descriptions of experiments, identify the important features of each design. Include as many of the components from Exercise 2.14 as needed to adequately describe the design.
a. A horticulturalist is measuring the vitamin C concentration in oranges in an orchard on a research farm in south Texas. He is interested in the variation in vitamin C concentration across the orchard, across the productive months, and within each tree. He divides the orchard into eight sections and randomly selects a tree from each section during October through May, the months in which the trees are in production. During each month, from eight trees he selects 10 oranges near the top of the tree, 10 oranges near the middle of the tree, and 10 oranges near the bottom of the tree. The horticulturalist wants to monitor the vitamin C concentration across the productive season and determine whether there is a substantial difference in vitamin C concentration in oranges at various locations in the tree.
b. A medical specialist wants to compare two different treatments (T1, T2) for treating a particular illness. She will use eight hospitals for the study. She believes there may be differences in the response among hospitals. Each hospital has four wards of patients. She will randomly select four patients in each ward to participate in the study. Within each hospital, two wards are randomly assigned to get T1; the other two wards will receive T2. All patients in a ward will get the same treatment. A single response variable is measured on each patient.
c. In the design described in (b) make the following change. Within each hospital, the two treatments will be randomly assigned to the patients, with two patients in each ward receiving T1 and two patients receivingT2.
d. An experiment is planned to compare three types of schools-public, privatenonparochial, and parochial-all with respect to the reading abilities of students in sixth-grade classes. The researcher selects two large cities in each of five geographical regions of the United States for the study. In each city, she randomly selects one school of each of the three types and randomly selects a single sixth-grade class within each school. The scores on a standardized test are recorded for each of 20 students in each classroom. The researcher is concerned about differences in family income levels among the 30 schools, so she obtains the family income for each of the students who participated in the study.