Psychological Intervention Research Techniques

This assignment presents an analysis of various Intervention research techniques. Given that Randomized Control Trials are considered to be a gold standard for testing the efficiency and efficacy of interventions, the main focus of this assignment will be on the value of other types of intervention research techniques. For the sake of convenience most of the examples in this assignment will focus on interventions for schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a disorder which is characterized by disturbances in the content of thought, perception, affect, sense of self, motivation, and behaviour. This dysfunction causes profound disruption in the individuals life thus there is a tremendous need to develop effective interventions for individuals with Schizophrenia (Halgin & Whitbourne, 2010). The initial part of the assignment will consist of a brief description of Randomized Control Trials and their advantages and disadvantages. The next section will present a critical analysis of various other Intervention Research Techniques that include various group based approaches and Ideographic approaches to intervention research.

Randomized Control Trials (RCT) is a quantitative experimental design that can be used to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention. In an RCT participants are randomly allocated to receive either one of the interventions or the placebo, and the groups are compared on various outcome measures to ascertain the effectiveness of the intervention (Stolberg, Norman & Trop, 2004). RCT is the only known research design which employs random assignment of participants to omit any systematic differences between the groups other than the independent variable thus overcoming the selection bias(Lovelock, Mathews, Murphy, 2010). Anothe...

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