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Part V: Statistical Studies and the Hunt for a Meaningful Relationship
Respecting ethical issues
The trouble with experiments is that some experimental designs are not
ethical. You can’t force research subjects to smoke in order to see whether
they get lung cancer, for example — you can only look at people who have
lung cancer and work backward to see what factors (variables being studied)
may have caused the disease. But because you can’t control for the various
factors you’re interested in — or for any other variables, for that matter —
singling out any one particular cause becomes difficult with observational
studies. That’s why so much evidence was needed to show that smoking
causes lung cancer, and why the tobacco companies only recently had to pay
huge penalties to victims.
Although the causes of cancer and other diseases can’t be determined ethically
by conducting experiments on humans, new treatments for cancer can be
(and are) tested using experiments. Medical studies that involve experiments
are called clinical trials. The U.S. government has a registry of federally and
privately supported clinical trials conducted in the United States and around
the world; it also has information available on who may participate in various
clinical trials. Check out www.clinicaltrials.gov for more information.
Serious experiments (such as those funded by and/or regulated by the U.S.
government) must pass a huge series of tests that can take years to carry
out. The approval of a new drug, for example, goes through a very lengthy,
comprehensive, and detailed process regulated and monitored by the FDA
(Federal Drug Administration). One reason the cost of prescription drugs
is so high is the massive amount of time and money needed to conduct
research and development of new drugs, most of which fail to pass the tests
and have to be scrapped.
Any experiments involving human subjects are also regulated by the fed-
eral government and have to gain approval by a committee created for the
purpose of protecting “the rights and welfare of the participants.” The com-
mittees set up for different organizations have different names (such as
Institutional Review Board [IRB], Independent Ethics Committee [IEC], or
Ethical Review Board [ERB], to name a few) but they all serve the same pur-
pose. Research conducted on animals is more nebulous in terms of regula-
tions and continues to be a topic of much debate and controversy in the U.S.
and around the world.
Surveys, polls, and other observational studies are fine if you want to know
people’s opinions, examine their lifestyles without intervention, or examine
some demographic variables. If you want to try to determine the cause of a
certain outcome or behavior (that is, a reason why something happened), an
experiment is a much better way to go. If an experiment isn’t possible because

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