Some women would like to have children but cannot do so for medical reasons. One option for these women is a procedure called in
vitro fertilization (IVF), which involves injecting a fertilized egg into the woman's uterus. Two hundred women who were about to undergo IVF served as subjects in an experiment. Each subject was randomly assigned to either a treatment group or a control group. Women in the treatment group were intentionally prayed for by several people (called intercessors) who did not know them, a process known as intercessory prayer. The praying continued for three weeks following IVF. The intercessors did not pray for the women in the control group. Here are the results: 44 of the 88 women in the treatment group got pregnant, compared to 21 out of 81 in the control group. Is the pregnancy rate significantly higher for women who received intercessory prayer? To find out, researchers perform a test ofH0:p1>p2,where p1 and p2 are the actual pregnancy rates for women like those in the study who do and don't receive intercessory prayer, respectively. The women in the study did not know whether they were being prayed for. Explain why this is important.
First of all the pregnancy rate among the women that were prayed for is medium, it was not high while for those that were prayed for the pregnancy rate was low.
The research was important because it highlight the importance of prayer for a woman to get pregnant, and the women that got pregnant did not know they were being prayed for because if they knew, it will lead to biasness of the research result.
So to obtain a non bias result, the women in the treatment group were not told that they were being prayed for.
