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Dr. Rodgers is good friends with Mike McCarthy, the head coach for the Green Bay Packers. One day McCarthy tells Dr. Rodgers that the NFL has been talking about the negative effects of playing professional football. They decide to conduct a student to determine whether professional football players are more likely to develop dementia than other professional athletes. To that end, Dr. Rodgers randomly selects 20 players from the Green Bay Packers and 20 players from the Professional Golfing Association (PGA). He presents each participant with 40 word pairs to study for ten minutes. Following a five minute distractor task, Dr. Rodgers presents the participants one word of each word pair and tells them to speak the second half of the word pair. The total number of correctly recalled words is used to measure memory. Dr. Rodgers performs Pearson's r to see whether memory is related to the number of years each participant has played football or golf professionally. He finds no relationship between memory and years played (r (38) = +.07, p > .05). Dr. Rodgers and Mr. McCarthy present this information to the NFL to assure them football is no more dangerous than other professional sports.
Do you think Dr. Rodgers answered the research question appropriately? What concerns to you have with the research design and analysis? Fix it!