Study Questions for Chapter 4 of Shadish et al



Study Questions for Chapter 9 of Shadish et al.

“Practical Problems 1: Ethics, Participant Recruitment, and Random Assignment”

p. 281 Describe the famous unethical study that was carried out at the Tuskegee institute.

p. 281 What are three sources of help that researchers can use to avoid ethical problems?

p. 281 What is the name of the code of ethics for scientific research adopted by the United Nations General Assembly?

p. 281 Name and explain the three ethical principles proposed in the Belmont report.

pp. 281-282 What motivated the “justice” principle proposed in the Belmont report.?

p. 282 Be able to describe at least 4 of the 8 items that are required by the U.S. Public Health Service in research with human participants.

p. 283 Why do independent researchers often chooses to adhere voluntarily to the guidelines for informed consent and research adopted by the Department of Health and Human Services

p. 283 What do the initials “IRB” stand for? What does an IRB do?

p. 283 Explain why the “Guiding Principles” of the American Evaluation Association do not include the principle of beneficence?

p. 284 The ethical principles of the American Psychological Association under some circumstances allow a research practice that some might regard as wrong. What is this research practice? Which of the Belmont Reports three principles is most relevant to this particular practice?

p. 283-284 The practice of withholding treatment from some participants can be ethically question if the treatments are withheld from ____________________________________

Give a concrete example where this practice became an issue.

p. 284 What are the good ethical arguments for withholding treatments in experimental comparisons that involve new drugs?

p. 284 Give a concrete example of how an investigator might use a cross-over design to deal with the ethical concerns raised by withholding treatment from some participants. When does this strategy work best? Give a concrete example of a case where it would not work in an ethical manner. Which principle or principles of the Belmont Report seem most relevant here?

pp. 285 Describe how researchers on CAI found an ethical way to withhold the instruction from some students but not others.

p. 285 Name and explain three different strategies that a researcher might use in a study where there are concerns about withholding treatment from some participants.

p. 286 What do the initials TOD stand for? Describe the TOD control condition in Snyder and Wills’ (1989) study of marital therapy.

p. 286 How did Moberg et al (1993) deal with schools who refused to accept the “intensive treatment condition” in their study.\

p. 287 The case for assignment by need is strongest when ____________. Give an example. Which principle(s) of the Belmont Report seems most relevant?

p. 287 Some philosophers assert that even if the difference between two treatments is based on poor designs and is small, the ethical principal of autonomy requires ________.

p. 287 What is frequently true regarding participants who sign informed consent forms?

p. 287 Women in the Rockefeller MFSP program thought randomization was less fair than which alternatives? They thought

p. 288 If participants may not believe that a truly random procedure was used, how can the problem sometimes be ameliorated?

p. 288 Sometimes randomization to treatment is criticized because it withholds innovations from those who need it. But what did a review of randomized trials by Gilbert et al. (1977) show about medical innovations? What ironic point did Chalmers (1968) make about random assignment?

p. 288 What strategy did the Rockefeller MFSP program use to “soften” the effects of randomization?

p. 289 Be able to name and describe an FOUR of the “Partial Remedies to Ethical Problems with Random Assignment” in Table 9.1

p. 289 Give a concrete example of how a researcher could use an adaptive design to increase the proportion of assignment over time to the most successful condition.

p. 289 Why was the Physicians’ Aspirin Study discontinued?

p. 290 What legal and ethical dilemma did the New Jersey Negative Income Tax Experiment face? What had they promised to protect? Why was there a conflict?

p. 290 Under what circumstances may a researcher be forced to reveal confidential information about participants?

p. 291 When randomization has been challenged in court, what have the courts ruled (so far)?

p. 291 The Federal Judicial Center Advisory Committee on Experimentation in the Law (1981) recommended that before an experiment should be conducted within the justice system, five conditions should be met. Describe these conditions. Do you think these conditions should generally be met before educational or medical experiments are carried out?

p. 292 Give a concrete example from Shadish et al. of a randomized experiment that managed to recruit subjects, but paid a high price in external validity.

pp. 292-293 A friend of yours is doing a study in which the number of eligible participants is lower than anticipated. What are THREE suggestions you might make to your friend, based on Shadish et al.?

pp. 293 When Klesges et al. (1988) recruited participants for a workplace smoking cessation program, what subset of smokers tended to sign up? Why was this a problem for the study?

p. 293 In the experiment testing methods of police response to domestic violence, why was it a problem that police officers knew which condition would be assigned to the next case? What might an officer do if he/she thought that the case should be assigned to a different condition? How might this problem have been avoided (be specific about the details of this particular experiment, don’t just say “separating the eligibility and recruitment judgment from the assignment process”).

p. 294 What percentage of researchers funded by the National Institute of Justice over a 15-year period had never conducted one before?

p. 296 Why did a problem occur with the randomization process used in the 1970 draft lottery?

pp. 296-297 Explain in detail how to use simple random assignment and a table of random numbers to assign subjects to conditions in an experiment with three conditions.

Also explain how this procedure could be modified using “triplets” (p. 298) to ensure that the sample sizes are equal. Also explain how the procedure could be modified to ensure that there are twice as many participants in the control condition as in the treatment condition (see p. 299).

p. 298 What is the problem with the common procedure of assigning the last participants in a study to the condition with the least number of participants, to “even things up” by forcing equal cell sizes? Give a concrete example to illustrate this idea.

pp. 299-300 Describe the assignment procedure used by Klesges et al. in a smoking cessation maintenance program with Air Force trainees. Why did the researchers take this approach?

p. 300 What assignment procedure might an experimenter consider if (a) the budget is fixed and (b) the treatment is much more expensive than the control condition?

p. 300 Give an example of a study in which trickle process randomization might be appropriate.

p. 301 Describe how the National Job Training Partnership study used adaptive randomization. Why did they use this method?

p. 302 What is the definition of haphazard assignment? Give an example of a study that used a defensible haphazard assignment approach. Give an example where a particular type of haphazard assignment might inadvertently bias results.

p. 303 As long as randomization is implemented properly, any pretest differences that occur will always be due to _______________ .

p. 304 If sample size is large in a randomized experiment, what is the effect likely to be on pretest discrepancies between the groups? What is the effect likely to be on the statistical significance of these discrepancies?

p. 304 Describe that matching strategy used by Bergner (1974) in a study of couple communication patterns.

pp. 304-305 A research can remove over 90% of the bias due to the stratification variable if he/she uses how many strata?

p. 305 When is it especially recommended to use stratifying or matching?

p. 305 What are three important caveats (warnings) about the use of matching or stratifying?

p. 306 In a randomized experiment, ANCOV is especially useful to adjust which variables? Explain how this was done in the NIMH Treatment of Depression study.

p. 307 What is a statistical drawback to adding a large number of covariates? What is a financial drawback?

pp. 307-308 Dennis (1988) found that covert manipulation of randomization was especially likely under what circumstances?

p. 308-311 Name and explain the seven lessons that have been learned about implementing random assignment in field settings?

p. 309 How did Gueron (1999) convince staff to use randomization in an employment training experiment?

p. 309 According to Shadish et al, what is the “worst mistake” that a researcher can make?

p. 311 Boruch (1988) describes how one site in a large multisite study became distressed? Why did the site become distressed? How might this have been prevented?

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download