Lesson C: Within-Subjects Designs - Small N

Large N Design

A ________ compares the performance of groups of subjects

Small N Design

A ________ studies one or two subjects, often using variations of the ABA Reversal Design

Aggregate

_________ effects refers to the pooled findings from many subjects

Aggregate

Small N researchers argue that large N studies ignore individual subject responses to the independent variable and instead report ________ results or trends.

False

When subjects vary greatly in response to the independent variable, this creates a valid appearance of differences between groups.

True or False

Small N Design

A clinical psychologist could use a ________ to test a treatment when there are insufficient subjects and when she wants to avoid the ethical problem of an untreated control group

Animal Researchers

__________ prefer small N designs to minimize the acquisition and maintenance cost, training time, and possible sacrifice of their animal subjects

Analysis of Variance

Sir Ronald Fischer’s creation of the ________ allowed inferential testing of large N data

Operant Conditioning

Small N designs have been most extensively used in _________ research

B.F. Skinner

_________ examined the continuous behavior of individual subjects in preference to analyzing discrete measurements from separate groups of subjects

Baselines

In both large and small N designs, ________ are control conditions that allow us to measure behavior without the influence of the independent variable.

Ethically Indefensible

It would be __________ to cause a patient to relapse by returning to baseline after treatment appeared to improve behavior.

Ethical Considerations

The _________ of the researchers must be upheld when relapse threatens the health or safety of the patients or others, as in self-injurious, and suicidal or homicidal behavior

Extraneous Variable

The price that researchers pay when they cannot return the patient to their baseline is that they cannot rule out the possibility that the patient’s clinical improvement was caused by a/n _________.

Multiple Baseline Design

In a __________, a series of baselines and treatments are compared within the same subject, and once treatments are administered, they are not withdrawn

Multiple Baseline Design

The _________ approach could also be used to evaluate the effect of a treatment administered to different individuals after baselines of different lengths

True

A researcher can evaluate the effects of a treatment on two or more behaviors or on the same behavior in different settings.

True or False

False

In a multiple baseline design, an experimenter can withdraw treatments after administering them.

True or False

Dependent Variable

Researchers often visually inspect changes in the ________ across treatment conditions

Independent Variable

The ________’s effect is often apparent in the data of small N

Statistics

Researchers may also use ________ to analyze small N data

50 measurements

Unless __________ are taken during each baseline and treatment phase, important assumptions underlying inferential tests may be violated

Changing Criterion Designs

In _________, the criteria for reinforcement are incrementally increased as participants succeed

Changing Criterion Designs

An example of _________ is when, a subject might receive a reward for 30 minutes for daily exercise, later, for 45 minutes, and finally, for 60 minutes

Reinforcement

__________ for successive approximations of the target behavior is central to athletic training, behavior modification, biofeedback, and neurofeedback

Discrete Trials Design

A __________ is a small N design without baselines used in psychophysical research

Discrete Trials Design

A _________ has no baselines and administers the levels of the independent variable 100s to 1000s of times to each subjects.

Independent Variable

The large number of data points produced by 100s to 1000s of discrete trials design provides a very reliable measurement of the effect of the ________

Human Sensory Systems

The similarity of _________ allows researchers to generalize from a small number of subjects

Clinical Subject

A small N design is appropriate when studying a _________ or when very few subjects are available

Generalizability

A large N design would be desirable when we have sufficient subjects and want to increase _________

False

The generalizability of a large N study depends on how we select our sample since a seriously biased sample can still represent the population

True or False

Replications

The generalizability of a small N study depends on repeated successful ________ with different subjects

Controlled

If a large N study’s sample is poorly ________, there will be no valid findings to generalize

True

A well-controlled small N experiment using a single subject might be successfully replicated across sufficient subjects to generalize its results to the population from which they were drawn

True or False