Adolescence: Research Strategies - Matched-Subjects Design

Researchers try to duplicate some of the strengths of subjects designs in a matched subjects design.

A matched subject design uses separate experimental groups.The idea is that it reduces the chances of an influential variable skewing the results.

Matched subjects are often used in education to compare treatments without using randomized groups.

A matched subject research program is used in a study to compare two new methods for teaching reading.The current method and a modern method will be compared by the researchers.They use the results of their last reading comprehension test to pick two groups of children and match them with each other.The researchers would have to find three comparable children to compare between the three groups if they wanted to test another method.

It is possible to match for more than one variable.A study can be done to see if a daily exercise routine improves the health of the inhabitants of a nursing home.It is possible to match smokers and ex-smokers.

Given the complexity of humans and the sheer number of factors that can influence behavior, this is difficult for every factor, without huge groups and making the project unnecessarily complex, especially if you are testing multiple treatments.

The goal of a matched subjects design is to emulate the conditions within a subject design, while avoiding the temporal effects that can affect results.

A matched subjects design uses the same statistical methods to analyze the results as a within subject design does, but it comes as close as possible to that.There is no chance of differences between individuals affecting the results.The strength of the matched subjects design is used to eliminate the possibility of order effects, which can affect the results.

The design is an excellent compromise between reducing order effects and smoothing out variation between individuals, but it is not perfect.There will always be some variation even with careful matching.The researchers can only hope to match the most influential variables, which is an approximation, in the nursing home example.

The researcher might be wrong in their assumptions about which variables are the most important.In an educational example, one of the children may have had a really bad day, been ill or suffered from nerves, giving her a lower score than her reading comprehension would indicate.

Matching subjects designs are useful because they allow researchers to perform streamlined and focused research programs while maintaining a good degree of validity.

Shuttleworth was born on Feb 27, 2009.The subjects were matched.On May 29, 2021, from Explorable.com: "matched-subjects-design".

The text in this article is free to use.

If you give appropriate credit and link to this page, you're free to copy, share and adapt any parts of the text in the article.

That is all.If you include a link back to this page, you don't need our permission to copy the article.You can use it without restriction, and we're okay with people using it in publications like books, blogs, newsletters, course-material, papers and presentations.