Suggested answer to exercise: Evaluation of a nurse-run asthma school, 2

Question 2: In 'Smoking habits', what is meant by ‘n.s.’? What can we conclude from this?

Suggested answer

This means `not significant'. The probability of getting a difference as big as this if the null hypothesis were true is greater than 0.05. We can conclude that we have failed to show that there is a difference in the population, i.e. that smoking decreases following Asthma School. We cannot conclude that there is no difference. There may be a difference which the sample is not large enough to detect.


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