Announcements

1
Announcements

• Reminder exam 1 a week from today
• Need to check with me regarding clinical paper
  topic. Deadline Oct. 3rd
• Upcoming assignment parent interview. See
  handout.

2
Research Methods
3
Types of Investigations

• Naturalistic or Observational Studies
• (correlational studies studies with
  quasi-experimental designs)
• Characteristics of correlational studies
• Relationships/Causality
• e.g. Harvard students/SAT
• e.g. TV watching and aggression in children (see
  next slide)

4
TV and aggression

• Headlines
• TV Time Yields Violence (The Boston Globe)
• Just an hour of TV time a day leads to
  violence (Reuters)

5
Relationships/Causality

• Three ways that relationships can work
• TV causes aggression
• Aggression causes TV watching
• (e.g. no friends, time to kill)
• Third variable causes them both
• Example health of babies born to smoking and
  nonsmoking parents

6
Classic Experimental Studies

• Need to meet two conditions
• Random assignment to groups
• Experimental control
• Steps to design an experimental study
• Operationalize independent and dependent
  variables
• Randomly assign participants to groups

7
Classic Experimental Studies

• Conclusions/limitations
• Greatest strength is causality
• Main problem is inability to use random
  assignment
• generalizability

8
Single Subject Design

• (Case studies and within subject designs)
• Case studies
• Used to figure out what might be important
• Used when situation or disorder is very rare
• Single subject designs
• Used to assess change in behavior related to an
  intervention
• A B A B design

9
Time Frame of Studies

• Cross sectional research
• Cheaper, easier but cant look at change over
  time
• Prospective longitudinal design
• Capture developmental processes but
  time-consuming
• Accelerated longitudinal design
• Cohort sequential design

10
Pedro-Carroll Cowan divorce intervention study

• Intro.
• Establishes importance of research
• Reviews prior research
• Highlights gaps, builds
• Didnt address developmental impact of divorce
• Doesnt address divorce vs. prior conditions
• Why chose particular areas??

11
Divorce intervention study cont

• Methods
• strengths
• Low dropout rate
• Control group and random assignment
• Range of sources of info./measurements
• weaknesses
• Expectancy effects
• Variability in post divorce time
• No attention control group reactivity?
• No info. on measures used

12
Review for exam

• Know everything
• Developmental psychopathology model
• Risk/resilience/protective factors
• Several questions on research methods and
  interpretation of findings
• Be able to design a study
• Be able to interpret results from each method
  (what can you know and not)
• Divorce article and discussion in class
• Importance of development in child
  psychopathology