Between Subjects Design A between subjects design is a way of avoiding the carryover effects that can plague within

subjects designs, and they are one of the most common experiment types in some scientific disciplines, especially psychology. The basic idea behind this type of study is that participants can be part of the treatment group or the control group, but cannot be part of both. If more than one treatment is tested, a completely new group is required for each. What is a Between Subjects Design? A group of researchers wants to test some modifications to the educational program and decide upon three different modifications. They pick a school and decide to use the four existing classes within an age group, assuming that the spread of abilities is similar. Each group of children is given a different educational program, along with a control group sticking with the original. All of the groups are tested, at the end, to determine which program delivered the most improvement. If the researchers want to be a little more accurate and reduce the chances of differences between the groups having an effect, they use modifications of the design. For example, maybe one class had a great teacher and has always been much more motivated than the others, a factor that would undermine the validity of the experiment. To avoid this, randomization and matched pairs are often used to smooth out the differences between the groups.

Advantages of Between Subjects Design Between subjects designs are invaluable in certain situations, and give researchers the opportunity to conduct an experiment with very little contamination by extraneous factors. This type of design is often called an independent measures design because every participant is only subjected to a single treatment. This lowers the chances of participants suffering boredom after a long series of tests or, alternatively, becoming more accomplished through practice and experience, skewing the results. Disadvantages of Between Subjects Design The main disadvantage with between subjects designs is that they can be complex and often require a large number of participants to generate any useful and analyzable data. Because each participant is only measured once, researchers need to add a new group for every treatment and manipulation. Practicality: Researchers testing educational programs, for example, might need two groups of twenty children for a control and test group. If they wanted to add a third program to the mix, they would need another group of twenty children. For many research programs, the sheer scale of the experiment and the resources required can make between subjects designs impractical. If the condition tested is rare, then finding enough subjects becomes even more difficult. Individual Variability: The other problem is that it is impossible to maintain homogeneity across the groups; this method uses individuals, with all of their subtle differences, and this can skew data. Age, gender and social class are just some of the obvious factors but intelligence, emotive quotient and every other personality construct can influence the data. If, for example, you were using a between subjects design to measure intelligence, how do you guarantee that emotion does not play a role? Some people may be very intelligent but are nervous when completing tests, so achieve lower scores than they should. These individual differences can create a lot of background noise, reducing the effects of the statistics and obscuring genuine patterns and trends.

Assignment Bias: Imagine researchers comparing educational programs, and they decide to use two schools as their participants. They find that there is a difference between the two groups and conclude that treatment A is better than treatment B. However, they neglected to take into account the fact that the schools contain children from different socio-economic backgrounds, and this created assignment bias. A better idea would have been to use children from a single school or use random assignment, but this is not always possible. Generalization: Whilst it is easy to try to select subjects of the same age, gender and background, this then opens the door for generalization issues, as you cannot then extrapolate the results to encompass wider groups. Striking the best balance is one of the keys to conducting a between subjects design. Failure to do this can lead to assignment bias, the ogre that threatens to destroy this type of research. Environmental Factors: Environmental variables are another major issue and usually arise from poor research design. In the example above, imagine that the researchers did, in fact, use participants from a single school and randomly assigned them. Due to time restrictions, they tested one group in the morning and one in the afternoon. Many studies show that most people are at their mental peak in the morning, so this will certainly have created an environmental bias. These factors could very easily become confounding variables and weaken the results, so researchers have to be extremely careful to eliminate as many of these as possible during the research design. These disadvantages are certainly not fatal, but ensure that any researcher planning to use a between subjects design must be very thorough in their experimental design. Within subject design In a within subject design, unlike a between subjects design, every single participant is subjected to every single treatment, including the control. This gives as many data sets as there are conditions for each participant; the fact that subjects act as their own control provides a way of reducing the amount of error arising from natural variance between individuals. These tests are common in many research disciplines. An education researcher might want to study the effect of a new program on children and test them before, and after, the new method has been applied. Psychologists often use them to test the relative effectiveness of a new treatment, often a difficult proposition. The sheer complexity of the human mind and the large number of potential confounding variables often renders between subjects designs unreliable, especially when necessarily small sample groups make a more random approach impossible.

Examples of Within Subject Designs One of the simplest within subject designs is opinion - watch any formalized debate and you will see the process. The chairperson will take a vote before the debate, to establish a baseline opinion, and will ask the audience to vote again at the end. The team that gained the most votes obviously managed to sway opinion in the same subjects much better, so can be announced as the winner. Another common example of a within-subjects design is medical testing, where researchers try to establish whether a drug is effective or whether a placebo effect is in order. The researchers, in the crudest form of the test, will give all of the participants the placebo, for a time, and monitor the results. They would then administer the drug for a period and test the results. Of course, the researchers could just as easily administer the drug first and then the placebo. This ensures that every subject acts as their own control, so there are few problems with matching age, gender and lifestyle, reducing the chance of confounding factors. The Advantages of Within Subject Designs

The main advantage that the within subject design has over the between subject design is that it requires fewer participants, making the process much more streamlined and less resource heavy. For example, if you want to test four conditions, using four groups of 30 participants is unwieldy and expensive. Using one group, which is tested for all four, is a much easier way. Ease is not the only advantage, because a well planned within subject design allows researchers to monitor the effect upon individuals much more easily and lower the possibility of individual differences skewing the results. The Disadvantages of Within Subject Designs One disadvantage of this research design is the problem of carryover effects, where the first test adversely influences the other. Two examples of this, with opposite effects, are fatigue and practice. In a long experiment, with multiple conditions, the participants may be tired and thoroughly fed up of researchers prying and asking questions and pressuring them into taking tests. This could decrease their performance on the last study. Alternatively, the practice effect might mean that they are more confident and accomplished after the first condition, simply because the experience has made them more confident about taking tests. As a result, for many experiments, a counterbalance design, where the order of treatments is varied, is preferred, but this is not always possible. SEVERAL REPEATED DESIGN The repeated measures design is a stalwart of scientific research, and offers a less unwieldy way of comparing the effects of treatments upon participants. The term 'repeated measures design' is often interchanged with the term 'within subjects design,' although many researchers only class a subtype of the within subjects design, known as a crossover study, as a repeated measures design. What is a Repeated Studies Design? The repeated measures design uses the same subjects with every condition of the research, including the control. This requires fewer participants and resources and also decreases the effects of natural variation between individuals upon the results. Repeated subject designs are commonly used in longitudinal studies, over the long term, and in educational tests where it is important to ensure that variability is low. Repeated subjects designs do have a couple of disadvantages, mainly that the subjects can become better at a task over time, known as practice effects or, conversely, they become worse through boredom and fatigue. In addition, if some of the subjects pull out before completing the second part, this can result in a sample group too small to have any statistical significance.

Repeated Measures Designs - Crossover Studies The crossover design is, by far, the most common type of repeated measures design, based around ensuring that all of the subjects receive all of the treatments. In an experiment with two treatments, the subjects would be randomized into two groups. The first group would be given treatment A followed by treatment B, the second would be given treatment B followed by treatment A. It is also possible to test more than two conditions, if required, and this experiment meets the requirements of randomization, manipulation and control.

Like all repeated measures designs, this reduces the chance of variation between individuals skewing the results and also requires a smaller group of subjects. It also reduces the chance of practice or fatigue effects influencing the results because, presumably, it will be the same for both groups and can be removed by statistical tests. The major pitfall is if the carryover effects are asymmetrical, if B affects A more than A affects B, for example. The main weakness of a crossover study is the possibility of carryover effects, where administration of the first condition affects the results gained in the second. For example, imagine medical researchers testing the effects of two drugs upon asthma sufferers. There is a chance that the first drug may remain in the subject's system and affect the results of the second, one of the reasons why medical researchers usually leave a 'washout' period between treatments. In addition, crossover studies suffer badly if there is a high dropout rate amongst participants, which can adversely affect the validity by unbalancing the groups and reducing the statistical validity. Despite this, crossover studies remain the most common repeated measures design, due to the ease and practicality.