PSYC 412 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Psychopathology, Structured Interview, Observational Error

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 412
• Professor: Melanie Dirks

Document Summary

If designed carefully, it allows us to establish cause: The intervention is responsible for the change. Think carefully about what you are going to compare your intervention to. Control groups: this affects the conclusions i can draw about my intervention. Wait-list control group: the people in the control will get the intervention eventually (for ethical reasons, we want to make sure that the people will have access to the treatment at a later point) Attention-only control group: it might be the attention or meeting with the person administering the study that is causing the changes and not the intended intervention. We can randomly assign people to a treatment where they get the meeting with the therapist but not the specific content of the intervention. Treatment as usual: participants are assigned to either the new treatment or what they would have gotten if they sought treatment naturally. Useful for ethical reasons, we cannot deny people with treatment.