When Children and Adolescents Are Discharged from the Hospital the Parents

question 40

Essay

When children and adolescents are discharged from the hospital the parents may still provide substantial care, such as the insertion of a feeding tube through the nose and down the esophagus into the stomach. It is difficult for parents to know how far to insert the tube, especially with rapidly growing infants. It may be possible for parents to measure their child's height and from that calculate the appropriate insertion length using a regression equation. At a major children's hospital, children and adolescents' heights and esophageal lengths were measured and a regression analysis performed. The data from this analysis is summarized below: r = 0.995, = 11.476 + 0.181H
a)For a child with a height one standard deviation above the mean, what would be the predicted esophageal length?
b)What proportion of the variability in esophageal length is accounted for by the height of the children and adolescents?
c)From the information presented above, does it appear that the esophagus length can be accurately predicted from the height of young patients? Provide statistical evidence for your response.

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Definitions:

Regression Equation

An equation derived in regression analysis that represents the expected value of the dependent variable as a function of one or more independent variables.

Variation

Variation refers to the distribution of data points or values within a dataset, indicating how much the data differ from each other.

Qualitative Variables

Variables that express descriptive, non-numerical qualities or categories.

Indicator Variables

Indicator variables, also known as dummy variables, are numeric variables used in statistical models to represent categorical data, with values typically 0 or 1 indicating the absence or presence of a characteristic.