Thanks for participating on the Statistics Team. Some of the regular members of our team are busy with other projects right now and we appreciate your help until they are free again. I think you will find it a worthwhile opportunity to round out your experience at the NDCC. The Statistics Team was formed to assist investigators in effectively and efficiently conducting the statistical analysis involved in their investigations.

You will begin to receive emails from Epidemic Investigation Service (EIS) Officers at the NDCC who are working on investigations and need help. Please treat each of these requests as both important and urgent, getting back to the requestor quickly. We are dedicated to getting back to each request as quickly as possible. Most importantly, please make sure you thoroughly answer each question, including as much background information as necessary to make your response complete and easy to understand.

Good luck with your efforts for the NDCC Statistics Team, and thanks in advance for your hard work!

Cecilia Young

Dr. Cecilia Young referred me to you. I hope you can help me with the development of an appropriate hypothesis for a study we’re working on.

This is a national study about the effectiveness of vaccinations. As you probably know, there is always some controversy about this topic, and the NDCC often handles the larger-scale studies. Right now, we’re reviewing data on a sample of high school students who received the vaccine when they were in elementary school. Some of these students were vaccinated for chicken pox and some weren’t.

What we really want to know is whether the vaccine was effective in preventing the occurrence of the disease. So, based on that, we’ve formed this hypothesis:

“The chicken pox vaccine prevents chicken pox.”

As I was thinking more about it, I remembered vaguely that there may be different types of hypotheses, and that there is a certain way to form a hypothesis to make sure it’s testable. I want to make sure we get this right for our study so, I have a few questions for you:

• First, am I right that there different types of hypotheses, and if so, how are they related?
  
• What do you think of our hypothesis above? Is it appropriate to be testable?
  
• If there are problems with it, please tell me what they are so I can fix them.
  
• Please provide another example of a good, testable hypothesis with an explanation of why it’s good so I can better understand how to form an appropriate hypothesis, not just for this study but in the future too.

Thanks for your help,

Jennifer