Discussion Topics When Setting Up An Experimental Design
When you want to set up an experimental design or randomized clinical trial there are a couple of things that need to be thought of before actually doing the experiment . An experimental design is the laying out of a detailed experimental plan in advance of doing the experiment. Some of the following topics have already been discussed in the principals of experimental design section.
1. How many factors will the design have? and are the levels of these factors fixed or random?
2. Are control conditions needed, and what should they be?
3. Manipulation checks; did the manipulation really work?
4. Background variables.
5. Sample size. How many units need to be collected for the experiment to be generalisable and have enough power?
6. The relevance of interactions between factors.
7. The occurrence of delayed effects of substantive factors on outcomes.
8. The occurrence of response shifts in self-report measures.
9. The feasibility of repeated administration of the same measurement instruments to the same units at different occasions, with a post-test and follow-up tests.
10. The use of a proxy pretest.
11. Blocking variables.
12. Blinding. Should the client/patient, researcher or even the analyst of the data be blind to conditions?
13. The feasibility of subsequent application of different conditions to the same units.
Read more about this topic: Design Of Experiments
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