BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR

A Single-subject design or a single-case design is a type of experimental research concentrated in the study of just one participant.  This kind of design ensures better control over the experiment and consequently higher confidence in cause-and-effect and inferences about the variables. A phase represents the basic structure of the major part of single-subject kinds of experiments, and a phase change means that a change of condition that can happen during the treatment. The goal is to demonstrate that this change occurs followed by a variation of behavior too, that could be observed when we interrupt a therapy, for example.  Generally, a phase change is determined by the participant’s responses and the researcher intervention to address any possible problem appropriately. The phase is essential to establish how the pattern of behavior present in a baseline phase changes when the researcher switches to a treatment phase . This informations can be well presented ...

      When scientists start thinking about a research question, they must consider the ideal design to address it. In most cases, analyzing the relationship between two variables, scientists can reach their goal. However, there are more complex kinds of studies that request a different analysis, and consequently a less obvious design like what we saw until now. When more than one independent variables (or quasi-independent variable) are relevant to influence the existence of the dependent variables being studied, it is necessary to use a  factorial design  to understand how these two variables act over the dependent variable alone. This kind of design is widely used to analyze the effect of educational methods among students, and in agriculture science, testing the effect of variables on crops for example.       Based on the fact that it allows researchers to manipulate in a large number of variables, the fact...

“[A] quasi-experimental design is not the method of choice, but rather a fallback strategy” (Hendrick, Bickman & Rog, 1993).  Research can be classified a nonexperimental when it is focused on a single variable, as the example of Milgram's Obedience Study, than on a statistical relationship between two variables with ambiguous results of cause-and-effect.     The quasi-experiment can be seen as a derivation of nonexperimental research.  It is an alternative strategy to produce research when the conditions available to collect the data are not so favorable to the researcher. Even when it resembles an experiment,  and the quasi-experimental research strategy is designed to address cause-and-effect about the relationship between two variables, it will eventually contain some flaws that would prevent underlining the cause of a specific behavior.  Generally, this strategy will involve confounding variables that will compromise t...

The within-subjects design, which is also known as repeated-measures design, is a research procedure characterized by submitting the same group of individuals to different treatment conditions and then make scores comparisons between them.  This kind of design must ensure all the same basic principles of the experimental research as the between-subjects design does. As an example, we can say that a researcher is interested in the effect of how the number of students in a class can influence on student concentration capacity to understand the subject. Exposing the same group of students to different situations like a full classroom with 40 students in University A and the same group in a smaller class of 5 students at University B, the researcher can access different scores of following tests based on the lectures that they have received at both places. Through the scores, the research can compare how the number of students in the class can interfere in students’ co...

The  between-subject  or  independent-measures experimental design  is a kind of strategy that allows the researcher to obtain two or more different scores from different groups of participants through the manipulation of the independent variable and then comparing the score results.  This strategy is used in experimental research permitting to achieve different results by two or more different treatment conditions in the same experiment, which every participant is only subjected to a single treatment.  This strategy has a significant advantage as decreasing the chances of participants suffering boredom after a long series of tests or becoming more accomplished through practice and experience, creating biased results. However, even though it is widely used in psychology's experiment, this strategy presents disadvantages due to the   presence of confounding variables.  Individual differences (assignment...

The experimental research strategy's fundamental purpose is establishing the existence of a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables. This kind of approach is recognized as a true experiment which results represent an unambiguous response achieved by considering the four essential elements of this kind of strategy: Manipulation, Measurement, Comparison, and Control of the variables. Studies that seek to investigate how does sensory stimulation affect human attention are examples of how researchers can use this kind of strategy to produce new findings on this topic.  They can design research using this strategy after to theorize that the misuse of an electronic device as a laptop might interfere negatively in how a student assimilates the lecture content in class, for instance.  In this kind of strategy, the expected result can be achieved through an experiment that one variable is manipulated (in...