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Research and Literature 8
Informing Yourself about Recent Behavior Analytic Research and Literature
Objectives: You will be able to identify components of an empirical (scientific) study and discriminate a single-subject design research article from other types of articles.
Part 1A:
Applied Behavior Analysis has as its analytic foundation in single-subject research designs (SSEDs) and peer-reviewed literature. Over this semester, you have been completing assignments designed to increase your competence in critically reviewing the research literature with respect to: a) the integrity of measurement and experimental design to control for threats to internal and external validity of research findings.; and b) the professional referencing of research articles using APA formatting. This assignments integrates the content from these previous assignments into the current assignment that is designed to teach you how to identify ”empirical” single-subject design studies. That is, those that use single-subject designs and are scientific in the sense that articlesa justification for doing the study
- a clear experimental question or hypothesis
- a precise description of the methods employed, including:
- details about participants,
- setting,
- validity and reliability of behavioral measures,
- instructional or other behavior change procedures, and:
- scientifically sound analytic methods using single-subject designs such as:
- Multiple-baseline design
- ABAB reversal design
- Changing criterion designs
- Multiple-treatment design (e.g., alternating treatment, multielement)
- Multiple-probe design
- a clear graphic display and interpretation of the
- and a discussion and conclusions that flow logically from the above.
Now, let’s practice identifying the components of SSED empirical/scientific articles. For the following scientific research article, please fill in the information below with regard to the components of this article.
List or abbreviate the journal title, year, issue, author, title and pages of the article citedabove.
| Journal Title | Year | Issue # | Author(s) | Title | Pages |
|
|
After reading the abstract, answer the following:
| What main area does it address? | |
| Who were the participants or subjects? | |
| What did the investigators do? Assuming the abstract includes the independent variable (typically the intervention in ABA), list it here. | |
| What were the dependent variables (measures of the behaviors that were changed)? | |
| What was the design? | |
| What were their main findings? |
Part 1B:
Now, we will address the 2nd component of our assignment objective, which is for you to discriminate a single-subject design(SSED) research article from other types of articles.
That is, other published articles have different formats including:
- Between-group design studies
- Literature reviews
- Opinion/position papers
Between-group design studies: In a between-subjects design, also called a between-groups design, every participant experiences only one condition, and you compare group differences between participants in various conditions. It’s the opposite of a within-subjects design, where every participant experiences every condition.
Literature reviews: A literature review is a comprehensive summary of previous research on a topic. The literature review surveys scholarly articles, books, and other sources relevant to a particular area of research. The review should enumerate, describe, summarize, objectively evaluate and clarify this previous research.
Opinion/position paper:A position paper presents an arguable opinion about an issue. The goal of a position paper is to convince the audience that the author’s opinion is valid and worth listening to.
The following 2 abstracts are NOT single-subject designresearch articles. You will identify which type of article each represents given the choices after each example.
Abstract #1
Young children with pervasive developmental disorder were randomly assigned to intensive treatment or parent training. The intensive treatment group (7 with autism, 8 with pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified—NOS) averaged 24.52 hours per week of individual treatment for one year, gradually reducing hours over the next 1 to 2 years. The parent training group (7 with autism, 6 with pervasive developmental disorder NOS) received 3 to 9 months of parent training. The groups appeared similar at intake on all measures; however, at follow-up the intensive treatment group outperformed the parent training group on measures of intelligence, visual-spatial skills, language, and academics, though not adaptive functioning or behavior problems. Children with pervasive developmental disorder NOS may have gained more than those with autism.
INDICATEWHAT TYPE OF ARTICLE THIS IS BASED ON THE ABSTRACT:
| TYPE OF ARTICLE | Check One |
| Literature review | |
| Opinion paper | |
| Between groups design |
Give two phrases from the abstract that clued you to which type of article this was:
- enter phrase 1
- enter phrase 2
Abstract #2
The review explores current trends in the behavioral intervention literature for children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during 2008 and 2009. Noteworthy findings and intervention strategies are highlighted. Additionally, the quality of all reviewed studies is systematically evaluated. During 2008 and 2009, there was nearly a quarter increase in the number of behavioral intervention studies, as well as more randomized controlled trials and approaches other than applied behavior analysis. Many of the studies investigated commonly used ASD intervention practices or novel treatments. A few were conducted with underserved populations, such as toddlers and adults with ASD. Social impairment was the focus of the largest number of intervention studies. A small percentage of studies were rated as high-quality. Overall, the reviewed studies suggest that ASD-specific deficits can be improved through behavioral intervention. However, whereas progress continues to be made in our understanding of effective treatments for children with ASD, confidence in these findings would be improved with higher-quality studies.
INDICATEWHAT TYPE OF ARTICLE THIS IS BASED ON THE ABSTRACT:
| TYPE OF ARTICLE | Check One |
| Literature review | |
| Opinion paper | |
| Between groups design |
Give two phrases from the abstract that clued you to which type of article this was:
- enter phrase 1
- enter phrase 2
PART 2:
Now you are ready to determine if an article is a SINGLE-SUBJECT EXPERIMENTALresearch article. Please click on the links found on the Canvas page for each article, and then fill out the following form to rate each of the 5 articles by indicating if it is a research article.
Remember, to be a single-subject research study, the article must have the following components:
- a justification for doing the study
- a clear experimental question or hypothesis
- a precise description of the methods employed, including:
- details about participants,
- setting,
- validity and reliability of behavioral measures,
- instructional or other behavior change procedures, and:
-
scientifically sound analytic methods using single-subject designs such as:
- Multiple-baseline design
- ABAB reversal design
- Changing criterion designs
- Multiple-treatment design (e.g., alternating treatment, multielement)
- Multiple-probe design
- a clear graphic display of time-series data and interpretation of result.
- and a discussion and conclusions that flow logically from the above.
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