Question 9.33

9.33 Obesity and health.

Recent studies have shown that earlier reports underestimated the health risks associated with being overweight. The error was due to overlooking lurking variables. In particular, smoking tends both to reduce weight and to lead to earlier death. Note that you answered part (a) of this exercise if you completed Exercise 2.117 (page 116).

  1. Illustrate Simpson's paradox by a simplified version of this situation. That is, make up tables of overweight (yes or no) by early death (yes or no) by smoker (yes or no) such that
    • Overweight smokers and overweight nonsmokers both tend to die earlier than those not overweight.
    • But when smokers and nonsmokers are combined into a two-way table of overweight by early death, persons who are not overweight tend to die earlier.
  2. Perform significance tests for the combined data set and for the smokers and nonsmokers separately. If all P-values are not less than 0.05, redo your tables so that all results are statistically significant at this level.