[YB2] 7-14作业 by sunxcint

sunxcintUID: 2654472

76The following appeared as part of an article in a health and beauty magazine.

"A group of volunteers participated in a study of consumer responses to the new Luxess face cream. Every morning for a month, they washed their faces with mild soap and then applied Luxess. At the end of that month, most volunteers reported a marked improvement in the way their skin looked and felt. Thus it appears that Luxess is truly effective in improving the condition of facial skin."

The author of this article concludes that Luxess is truly effective in improving the condition of  facial skin. To justify this conclusion the author pointed out that an experiment of consumer responses to Luxess has been carried out and proved that after applying it for a months, the skins of most volunteers looked and felt better than before. The argument relies on a series of unsubstantiated assumptions, which considered together render the argument totally unconvincing.

One assumption involves the method which the author apply to draw the conclusion that Luxess is truly effective. Firstly, the author depends on the volunteers itself reporting the effect of Luxess, which sounds absurd enough. Second, the volunteers only report the effect by their feelings, not a objective skin index or other scientific experiments. Since the sense of  a person is subjective and different from each other, this method and the conclusion following it is also subjective and arbitrary.

The author's conclusion relies on the doubtful assumption that the concrete operation of volunteers in the experiment is scientific and reasonable. While this might be the case , the author provides no evidence to support it.  The volunteers first washed their faces with soap, whereas the author did not mention the effect of soap to the skins. It is entirely possible that it is soap that had improved, if  truly , the conditions of skins.
Besides, other factors which can improve the condition of the skin, such as the weather, the temper of a person in this period of study etc, should also been concerned and ruled out.

Even if the skin condition of all the volunteers did being improved in this period and the improvement did being due to the effect of Luxess, the author cannot convince me that Luxess will always be truly effective. I came to this conclusions based on two points: one involves the gross design of this study and the other is the durable effect of Luxess. The study only selected a group volunteers who carried on the experiment without any contrast.  Had a comparative group of volunteers without applying the Luxess been added to the study the credence of this study should be strengthened. Since the effect  and security of a healthy product should be enduring, the author should have carried on the study in a longer period of time , rather than just a month, to convince the consumers.

In conclusion, the author's conclusion is unconvincing as it stands.  To strengthen it the designer of this study must design the study more sophisticatedly and comprehensively and pay attention to the method for volunteers to give their conclusion about the effect of Luxess.