1st Edition

Evaluating What Works An Intuitive Guide to Intervention Research for Practitioners

By Dorothy V. M. Bishop, Paul Thompson Copyright 2024
234 Pages 51 B/W Illustrations
by Chapman & Hall

234 Pages 51 B/W Illustrations
by Chapman & Hall

234 Pages 51 B/W Illustrations
by Chapman & Hall

Those who work in allied health professions and education aim to make people’s lives better. Often, however, it is hard to know how effective this work has been: would change have occurred if there was no intervention? Is it possible we are doing more harm than good? To answer these questions and develop a body of knowledge about what works, we need to evaluate interventions. Objective... Read more

1. Introduction

2. Why observational studies can be misleading

3. How to select an outcome measure

4. Improvement due to nonspecific effects of intervention

5. Limitations of the pre-post design: biases related to systematic change

6. Estimating unwanted effects with a control group

7. Controlling for selection bias: randomized assignment to intervention

8. The researcher as a source of bias

9. Further potential for bias: volunteers, dropouts, and missing data

10. The randomized controlled trial as a method for controlling biases

11. The importance of variation

12. Analysis of a two-group RCT

13. How big a sample do I need? Statistical power and type II errors

14. False positives, p-hacking and multiple comparisons

15. Drawbacks of the two-arm RCT

16. Moderators and mediators of intervention effects

17. Adaptive Designs

18. Cluster Randomized Controlled Trials

19. Cross-over designs

20. Single case designs

21. Can you trust the published literature?

22. Pre-registration and Registered Reports

23. Reviewing the literature before you start

24. Putting it all together

25. Comments on exercises

26. References

Biography

Dorothy Bishop was Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at the University of Oxford from 1998 to 2022. Dorothy is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. She been recognised with Honorary Fellowships from the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, the British Psychological Society, and the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. She has Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, Western Australia, Lund, Sweden, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and Liège, Belgium. She is an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford.

Paul Thompson is an Assistant Professor in Applied Statistics and the department lead for statistics and quantitative methods at the Centre for Educational Development, Appraisal and Research (CEDAR) at the University of Warwick. Between 2014 and 2021 he worked at Oxford University within the Department of Experimental Psychology, working on a wide range of projects including behavioural, genetics, and neuroimaging (brain scanning) studies in developmental language disorders such as Dyslexia, and Developmental Language Disorder, and language development in those with learning and developmental disabilities, such as Down Syndrome and Autism.