are there some possible objections to the either the conclusion that is made or the assumptions that made the t-test possible. An example might be that you think it might be questionable that the underlying data is normally distributed.

This study's population is patients with spinal cord injuries in inpatient rehabilitation units. The goal of this study was to compare a treatment group who received opioids and a control group receiving placebos. The researchers want to determine if the intervention of a placebo would lead to a decrease in opioid consumption. This research used a paired t-test. This was considered to be a paired t-test because it looks at the same participants at baseline and post intervention. An assumption of a t-test is that the dependent variables are interval or ratio levels of measurement. In this study the dependent variable was pain level which can be measured on a numeric scale that does have a true zero, therefore this data is ratio. Another assumption is that the raw scores in the population are normally distributed. This assumption means that the pain levels should be "normal" in the population of the study. This study does meet this assumption because it did not have any extreme outliers and a decent population size. The next assumption of a t-test is that the difference between the paired scores are independent. This is true in this study because each person's pain level is independent of the other participant's pain level. The last assumption is that repeated measures of data are collected from one group, resulting in paired scores. This was used in this study because the researchers collected data both pre and post intervention and then used this data to compare the scores to determine significance. The findings in this study were that the difference in pain between the placebo and treatment groups was not significant. Overall, I think this was a good study that effectively used a t-test to determine the difference in placebo and treatment groups and the rate of opioid use pre and post-intervention.