Question

A researcher is interested in the association between hours studying and hours spent at the gym. She surveys 20 students and obtains a correlation coefficient of -0.80. Using an alpha level of 0.05 for a two-tailed test, what decision should the researcher make about the null hypothesis?

		Reject the null hypothesis
		Fail to reject the null hypothesis
		Reject the alternative hypothesis
		Accept the null hypothesis

Answer 1

We want to test

vs

Here r = -0.8

n = 20

Test statistic is given by

So t = -5.6568

degrees of freedom = 20 -2 = 18

So at 18 degrees of freedom at 5% level of significance

the critical value of t is -2.1009

As we can see that the calculated value of t is more extreme than critical value so we reject H0 at 5% level of significance.

Answer (A) Reject the null hypothesis

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