Sarah is a researcher at a children's psychiatric center. Her office has just been asked to conduct a pilot study on a new prescription medication used to treat anxiety called Drug X. Sarah wants to figure out if Drug X causes a reduction in anxiety-like the drug company claims. How can Sarah answer this question through a true experiment? Group of answer choicesSarah needs to randomly assign half of her participants to the treatment group and half to a control group for her studySarah needs to conduct a field experiment and should not worry about the random assignment of participants.Sarah needs to randomly assign her participants, and she must only conduct her study at different stages of participants’ lives.
Question
Sarah is a researcher at a children's psychiatric center. Her office has just been asked to conduct a pilot study on a new prescription medication used to treat anxiety called Drug X. Sarah wants to figure out if Drug X causes a reduction in anxiety-like the drug company claims. How can Sarah answer this question through a true experiment? Group of answer choicesSarah needs to randomly assign half of her participants to the treatment group and half to a control group for her studySarah needs to conduct a field experiment and should not worry about the random assignment of participants.Sarah needs to randomly assign her participants, and she must only conduct her study at different stages of participants’ lives.
Solution
Sarah can answer this question through a true experiment by conducting a randomized controlled trial. Here are the steps she needs to follow:
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Participant Selection: Sarah needs to identify a group of children who are suffering from anxiety at her psychiatric center. These will be the participants of her study.
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Random Assignment: She needs to randomly assign these participants into two groups. One group will be the treatment group, who will receive Drug X. The other group will be the control group, who will receive a placebo (a substance with no therapeutic effect, used as a control in testing new drugs).
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Treatment Administration: Sarah will then administer Drug X to the treatment group and the placebo to the control group. It's crucial that neither the participants nor Sarah know who is in which group (this is called a double-blind study) to prevent bias.
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Measurement of Anxiety Levels: Before and after the treatment, Sarah needs to measure the anxiety levels of all participants. She can use validated psychiatric scales to do this.
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Data Analysis: After the treatment period, Sarah will compare the anxiety levels of the treatment group with the control group. If the treatment group shows a significant reduction in anxiety levels compared to the control group, it can be inferred that Drug X is effective in reducing anxiety.
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Replication: To ensure the validity of her findings, Sarah should replicate her study with different participants.
This way, Sarah can scientifically test whether Drug X is effective in reducing anxiety in children.
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