ch5 Research Methods

THE IMPORTANCE OF BASELINES

Let’s imagine what might happen if you don’t use a properresearch design. Sometimes you need a good design, even when you’renot doing research—when you’re working as a practitioner. Considerthe case of Frank, a young man who was referred to the PsychologyService. He spent so many hours slapping his face, the staff had torestrain him. Before we started a behavioral intervention, wecollected baseline data on his unrestrained frequency ofself-injurious slapping. It was a good thing we did.

During eleven 30-minute observation periods, his frequency offace slapping rapidly dropped from over 600 an hour to nearly 0.But we hadn’t done anything! This was just baseline.

Consider this hypothetical situation: Imagine we had used apharmacological intervention in which Frank took a tranquilizerevery day in the hope that this would get rid of his face slapping.And suppose we had used the drug without getting baseline datafirst. It would have looked as if the drug had caused the decreasein slapping. Then Frank might have unnecessarily been on that drugthe rest of his life!

Moral: We often need to collect baseline datato make sure our intervention, our independent variable, is causingany changes we see in the dependent variable. It’s important to besure of what’s causing what, both for scientific and practicalreasons. So, as scientific researchers we need to collectbaselines, and even as practitioners, we sometimes need to collectbaselines (for example, physicians often withhold the prescriptionof antibiotics for a few days to be sure the antibiotics are neededto cure your sore throat). Practitioners may need to collectbaseline data when they’re not sure whether an elaborate,expensive, or potentially hazardous intervention is needed.

QUESTION

1.Give an example of the importance ofcollecting baseline data and what might happen if you didn’t.