Group Exercise 3: Designing a randomized controlled trial (RCT)

Assignment for Trauma (PSY 217), Spring 2021

Justin Dainer-Best https://affectlab.bard.edu/ (Bard College)https://psychology.bard.edu/

Overview

Group papers, as defined in the syllabus, involve creating a single document incorporating your group members’ work and answering the questions for that topic.

This paper should:

The paper is due by midnight on Monday, March 15th.

Specifics

Your group should plan to design a randomized controlled trial (RCT), sometimes also known as a randomized clinical trial. Your writing should include the components below as an imagined Methods section for a study to test a treatment for the survivors of intimate partner violence. (What specific treatment focus you’d like to use is up to your group.) Use the text in bold as headers for the text of the paper; write in paragraphs below each.

  1. Treatment arms: What treatments are you testing? There should be at least two possibilities, one of which can be a “placebo” or non-treatment control. Give a little bit of information about them.

  2. Participants: Who are your participants? How will they be recruited? How many? What will their demographics look like? What inclusion/exclusion criteria would you employ? (What gets someone in the study? // What means they can’t participate?)

  3. Measures: What do you intend to measure? How will you know which treatment is better? What would be a clinically significant effect?

  4. Hypotheses: Briefly, what do you expect to find, in terms of your treatment \(\times\) measures? Why?

  5. Procedures: What would happen in your study?

As always, you should plan to cite at least one academic article—likely related to the treatment you are going to test! (Use Google Scholar, PsycINFO, or any of the databases through the Bard library.)