Design and Conduct of Meaningful Experiments Involving Human Participants : 25 Scientific Principles

Designing and conducting experiments involving human participants requires a skillset different from that needed for statistically analyzing the resulting data. The Design and Conduct of Meaningful Experiments Involving Human Participants combines an introduction to scientific culture and ethical mores with specific experimental design and procedural content. Author R. Barker Bausell assumes no statistical background on the part of the reader, resulting in a highly accessible text. Clear instructions are provided on topics ranging from the selection of a societally important outcome variable to potentially efficacious interventions to the conduct of the experiment itself.

Early chapters introduce the concept of experimental design in an intuitive manner involving both hypothetical and real-life examples of how people make causal inferences. The fundamentals of formal experimentation, randomization, and the use of control groups are introduced in the same manner, followed by the presentation and explanation of common (and later, more advanced) designs. Replete with synopses of examples from the journal literature and supplemented by 25 experimental principles, this book is designed to serve as an interdisciplinary supplementary text for research-methods courses in the educational, psychological, behavioral, social, and health sciences. It also serves as an excellent primary text for methods seminar courses.

R. Barker Bausell is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland. He is author of A Practical Guide to Conducting Empirical Research, Snake Oil Science, Nursing Research: Design, Statistics, and Computer Analysis, Conducting Meaningful Experiments: 40 Steps to Becoming a Scientist, and Advanced Research Methodology, and he has served as Research Director of a NIH Funded Research Center. Bausell was Editor-in-Chief of the peer reviewed journal Evaluation and the Health Profession for over 30 years. He taught research methods and statistics to graduate students for 25 years and served as Director of Evaluation and Director of the Center for Research Methodology at the University of Maryland School of Nursing.