Single - Subject Designs
Using Single- Subject Designs
A Little History
A major goal of psychology is to understand human and animal behaviour. Understanding a particular behaviour means knowing what variables influence the behaviour and what functional relationships exist between these variables and behaviours.
Psychology’s beginnings as an experimental discipline began in the latter half of the 19th century.
Early researchers recognized the problems created by apparently random variations in the behaviour of their subject. One solution to these problems was to repeat the observations many times under a given set of conditions.
The focus on individual behaviour naturally led investigators to adopt a type of within-subjects approach. This approach worked despite if the intersubject variability.
Certain problems could not be attacked with this approach. These problems involved treatments that produced irreversible changes in subject behaviour.
The application of statistical techniques to the study of individual differences was pioneered by Sir Francis Galton in the late 1800’s.
The first correlational statistics was developed by Karl Pearson.
The development of inferential statistics to provide some of the first statistical tests by Sir Ronald Fisher in 1920’s and 1930’s.
Some die hard researchers persisted in using the old nonstatistical, single-subject approach like B.F.Skinner.
In 1968, the publisher of JEAB launched a second journal, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) to publish single – subject research on applied problems.
Baseline, Dynamic and Discrete Trial Designs
When researchers refer to “single-subject designs”, they usually mean baseline designs. It was developed by B.F. Skinner and his followers.
Dynamic designs which are closely related to baseline designs, are less common but becoming more popular as researchers focus on understanding the dynamics.
Discrete trials designs are still in use especially areas such as psychophysics, in which the
A Little History
A major goal of psychology is to understand human and animal behaviour. Understanding a particular behaviour means knowing what variables influence the behaviour and what functional relationships exist between these variables and behaviours.
Psychology’s beginnings as an experimental discipline began in the latter half of the 19th century.
Early researchers recognized the problems created by apparently random variations in the behaviour of their subject. One solution to these problems was to repeat the observations many times under a given set of conditions.
The focus on individual behaviour naturally led investigators to adopt a type of within-subjects approach. This approach worked despite if the intersubject variability.
Certain problems could not be attacked with this approach. These problems involved treatments that produced irreversible changes in subject behaviour.
The application of statistical techniques to the study of individual differences was pioneered by Sir Francis Galton in the late 1800’s.
The first correlational statistics was developed by Karl Pearson.
The development of inferential statistics to provide some of the first statistical tests by Sir Ronald Fisher in 1920’s and 1930’s.
Some die hard researchers persisted in using the old nonstatistical, single-subject approach like B.F.Skinner.
In 1968, the publisher of JEAB launched a second journal, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) to publish single – subject research on applied problems.
Baseline, Dynamic and Discrete Trial Designs
When researchers refer to “single-subject designs”, they usually mean baseline designs. It was developed by B.F. Skinner and his followers.
Dynamic designs which are closely related to baseline designs, are less common but becoming more popular as researchers focus on understanding the dynamics.
Discrete trials designs are still in use especially areas such as psychophysics, in which the