A health psychologist was interested in investigating whether mindfulness traini

Question

A health psychologist was interested in investigating whether mindfulness training would help people suffering from chronic pain such as arthritis.  He recruited 60 middle aged residents from Albuquerque who claimed in a screening telephone interview to have suffered from chronic pain for at least two years.    When subjects arrived at his lab he gave them a standard pain assessment scale to determine the extent and severity of their pain.   He then randomly assigned each subject to one three groups.  One group received a one-day mindfulness training workshop and a second group received a one-day training workshop in yoga. Both groups were instructed to practice their methods once a day.  A third group was told that they were on a wait list and would receive pain management training when it became available.  

At the end of 12 weeks he administered the same pain assessment scale to all subjects.  The primary dependent variable was the change in scores from the first to second assessments.   He performed a one-way ANOVA on these change scores and found that both mindfulness training and the wait list groups had experienced reduced pain in comparison to the yoga group.

What type of research design was used?

How many levels of the independent variable were there?

What were the null and research hypotheses?  

Can you think of an alternative way to analyze the data?

Can you think of some ways to improve the study?

Explanation / Answer

1. The research design used in the experiment is a pretest-posttest between subjects design.

2. There were three levels of the independent variable: the mindfulness training conditioning, the yoga training conditioning and no training group.

3. Null hypothesis: Mindfulness training has no significant impact on chronic pain experienced by arthritis patients.

Alternative hypothesis: Mindfulness training decreases chronic pain experienced by arthritis patients.

4. Another way to analyse the data is to compare the groups on differences between post-test and pretest, sometimes called change scores or gain scores. The test can be carried out by conducting a t-test of the differences.

Please post the other questions separately as we are supposed to answer just one question or four sub parts of a question.

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