EXAMPLES: CHANGE

EXAMPLE 1: Measuring change is something that clinician researchers often wish to do for clients in therapy. Where you have a fairly large sample, you can measure the average amount by which they changed as a group from beginning to end of therapy, by having them all fill in a standardised symptom questionnaire. 

EXAMPLE 2: If you wanted to see whether the therapy had lasting effects in the sample of recipients, you would need to take measures of their well-being at the start, the end and then at a follow-up time, say 6 or 12 months after the end of therapy. Ideally the therapy recipients would maintain any gains shown during therapy, and would therefore show no negative change between end-of-therapy to follow-up.

NB: A better design of study than the examples above would be if you were able to make similar measures in a comparison sample of similar size who did not have the intervention. If you were able to randomly assign potential clients to intervention and comparison group, it would then be appropriate to call the comparison group a CONTROL GROUP. Some comparison groups are not true control groups because people are not randomly assigned to them. It is not always practicable to do random assignment, or it may be ruled out because it would be unethical in some circumstances.

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