A Researcher Was Interested in Determining Whether More Frequent Breaks

question 52

Essay

A researcher was interested in determining whether more frequent breaks (i.e., "coffee breaks") in a business setting would help employees to be more productive. With the cooperation of the management, employees on one floor of the corporate offices were allowed to take a 10-minute break each hour (at any time) between 8:00 and 11:00 A.M. (for a total of 30 minutes). The comparison group comprised employees on different floors who followed the usual corporate policy of taking a 30-minute break sometime during the morning (at any time). Measures of productivity were gathered for each employee according to his or her job (e.g., number of reports written, number of sales made, etc.). A time series analysis was applied to compare the productivity of both groups of employees for six months before and after the intervention (started in July). Quite surprisingly, the productivity of both groups increased following the onset of the intervention, suggesting to the researcher that the timing of breaks makes no difference.
-Explain why the "Hawthorne effect" may have influenced the results of this study.

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Definitions:

Standard Deviation

A metric that calculates the deviation or spread of data points in a dataset from the average value.

Range

The difference between the highest and lowest values in a dataset; it measures the extent of variability within the data.

Skewed

A description of the asymmetry in the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable, where the tail of the distribution is longer on either the right (positively skewed) or the left (negatively skewed) side.

Sample Mean

The average value of a set of data points collected from a sample of a population.