Question

Fertility Enhancement for Fish?

Fertility enhancement treatments are becoming one of the most common prescriptions written throughout the western culture. Their use may be most prevalent in the population of women in their thirties and forties.

Recently, environmentalists have looked into potential side-effects of these pills on aquatic life, especially fish populations. One such study showed that waste water from one town substantially increased synthetic estrogen levels in a nearby body of water during a season following introduction of a new treatment, but dropped during a 3 month period in which there was a drug shortage.

It is clear that such fluctuations in estrogen might have an influence on reproductive behaviors of fish contained in these waters.

The laboratories of PleaseEasy, famous for producing the most popular fertility pills in the western hemisphere, investigated whether its product had harmful effects on the reproductive behavior of the tench species. Tench is a type of fish that inhabits poorly oxygenated lakes and streams.

PleaseEasy laboratories introduced an updated fertility product to a moderately sized town in New Hampshire that had not had access to fertility pills in the past. The town is bordered by a stream abundant in tench along with other fish species.

“Focusing on this previously unexposed town made this an ideal setting for us to study whether our treatments are affecting the fish population,” said Bob Marker, a spokesperson for PleaseEasy in a phone interview. “We are very concerned about the environment.”

PleaseEasy sent a research team to the town to test whether the introduction of the new treatment would have measurable effects on the fish habitat.

“We thought that the use of fertility pills could have measurable effects on the fish because sewage containing residues of estrogen seep into streams or lakes where the fish live,” explained Marker.

The researchers studied the quantity of the fish population in the summer before the treatment was introduced, and then again one year after the treatment was introduced. They noted that the numbers of tenches did not significantly differ between the two times of measurement.

“At first we thought maybe no one was using our treatments, but several questionnaires revealed that they were in fact being used,” noted Marker. PleaseEasy concluded that the synthetic estrogen levels have no harmful effects on fish.

Which of the following are true (there may be more than 1):

- Poor or missing comparison group

- No Random assignment

- DV could be more sensitive, accurate, or precise

- DV is not scored objectively

- DV is not valid

- subject/participant bias

- mortality or attrition

- small sample size

- poor sample selection

- experimenter bias

- premature generalization of results

- confuse correlation with causation

Answer 1

Answer.

The given factors are true in the case of the research by the pharmaceutical company :

1. Poor comparison group. There is no control group to compare the effect of the independent variable

2. No random assignment procedure

3. The dependent variable could be more precise and sensitive as a mere increase in the tench population cannot tell about the success in fertility.

4. Small sample selection

5. Poor sample size

6. Premature generalisation of results

7. Confuse Correlation with causation as the coincidence in the level of estrangement in the water and the number of tench population does not explain whether the estrogen level actually influenced the fertility rates of the fish species.