Posted: February 2nd, 2016

Hospice -Graphing Results for a Single Subject Design

The chapter in the course text includes a discussion of longitudinal evaluation designs (trend studies, cohort studies, and panel studies). Longitudinal studies conduct observations over an extended period of time, usually measured in years. For example, children with a parent diagnosed with schizophrenia and those who do not might be followed and compared over many years to see if they become afflicted with schizophrenia. If the incidence of schizophrenia among the children with parents with schizophrenia is significantly higher than it is among the other children, then having a parent with schizophrenia would be deemed a risk factor for developing the disorder.

That being said, longitudinal evaluation studies are not appropriate for the outcome evaluation required for this course.

The instructions also ask if your evaluation design will include one or two groups. I posted a Word document titled Research Designs to be used as a supplement to the information contained in chapter 10 of the course text.

In that document, one-group or pre-experimental designs include those shown in the table below.
Where:
X = the intervention
Oi = one or more “observations” of the dependent or outcome variable, which could be an actual
observation by the researcher or a collateral, a self-report by the client, or the results of
some instrument (or all three)