The authors of the article “Accommodating Persons with AIDS:Acceptance and Rejection in Rental Situations†(Journal of AppliedSocial Psychology [1999]: 261-270) stated that, even thoughlandlords participating in a telephone survey indicated that theywould generally be willing to rent to persons with AIDS, theywondered whether this was true in practice. To investigate, theresearches independently selected two random samples of 80advertisements for rooms for rent from newspapers advertisements inthree large cities. An adult male caller responded to each ad inthe first sample of 80 and inquired about the availability of theroom and was told that the room was still available in 61 of thesecalls. The same caller also responded to each ad in the secondsample. In these calls, the caller indicated that he was currentlyreceiving some treatment for AIDS and was about to be released fromthe hospital and would require a place to live. The caller was toldthat a room was available in 32 of these calls. Based on thisinformation, the authors concluded that “reference to AIDSsubstantially decreased the likelihood of a room being described asavailableâ€. Do the data support this conclusion? (Use ? = 0.01)
