Designing Research Studies

The pieces are coming together. You now have developed many of the skills that are necessary to design effective research studies. In this exercise, you will practice using those skills to design a variety of studies on particular topics.

We want you to design studies in different ways and then identify how effective each design is in controlling sources of confounding. To make this exercise work, we want you to use both weak and strong designs.

In the text, we used the same example (studying the relationship of food additives to the degree of hyperactivity in children with ADHD) to illustrate how different research designs provide varying level of control over confounding. We want you to do the same thing with some other examples. Try to design studies using each of the designs in Chapter 10, including the weak nonexperimental designs, and critique each design in terms of which sources of confounding are controlled and which are not.

Think about the fad diets that you hear about constantly. New ones are being touted every day. Pick one of them and design a series of studies ranging from poorly controlled to well controlled using what you have learned about research design in the first 10 chapters of this text. You will probably find it interesting to search out the research evidence in support of the diet you choose. We bet you will find that such evidence either does not exist or represents very week scientific evidence.
Psychologists have speculated about the importance of environmental events during our upbringing on our adult personality. Think about this question and design studies ranging from poorly controlled to well controlled. In the process, you will likely discover why we have so little evidence on this important question.