Do employer-sponsored wellness programs work? About 5000 employees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign volunteered for a study to find
out. Researchers randomly assigned 3300 volunteers to a treatment group
and the remaining 1534 to a control group. Employees in the treatment group
were invited to take paid time off to participate in a wellness program. Those
in the control group were not allowed to participate. One measure of the
program's effectiveness was employee attrition. In the 2-year period following
the start of the study, 361 of the people in the treatment group left their job
for any reason, compared to 190 of the people in the control group. Do these
results provide convincing evidence at the a=0.05 level that offering
employees paid time off to participate in a wellness program reduces the
proportion who leave their job within 2 years for people similar to the ones in
this study?