What are the sources of treatment misidentification?

What will be an ideal response?


Treatment misidentification occurs when subjects experience a treatment that wasn’t intended by the researcher. Treatment misidentification has at least three sources:
1. Expectancies of experimental staff. Change among experimental subjects may be due to the positive expectancies of the experimental staff who are delivering the treatment rather than due to the treatment itself. Such positive staff expectations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy and can occur even in randomized experiments when well-trained staff convey their enthusiasm for an experimental program to the subjects in subtle ways. These expectancy effects can be very difficult to control in field experiments. However, in some experiments concerning the effects of treatments such as medical drugs, double-blind procedures can be used. Staff will deliver the treatments without knowing which subjects are getting the treatment and which are receiving a placebo—something that looks similar to the treatment but has no effect. In fact, the prison experiment discussed earlier in this chapter used a double-blind procedure to randomly assign inmates to a security classification category. In the experiment, only the executive director of the corrections department and the director of classification were aware of the research. Correctional staff, other individuals who worked with the inmates, and the inmates themselves were unaware of the study. In this way, any expectancies that the staff may have had were unlikely to affect inmate behavior.
2. Placebo effect. Treatment misidentification may occur when subjects receive a treatment that they consider likely to be beneficial and then improve because of that expectation rather than the treatment itself. In medical research, the placebo is often a chemically inert substance that looks similar to the experimental drug but actually has no medical effect. Research indicates that the placebo effect produces positive health effects in two thirds of patients suffering from relatively mild medical problems (Goleman, 1993). Placebo effects can also occur in social science research. The only way to reduce this threat to internal validity is to treat the comparison group with something similar.
3. Hawthorne effect. Members of the treatment group may change in terms of the dependent variable because their participation in the study makes them feel special. This problem can occur when treatment group members compare their situation to that of the control group members who are not receiving the treatment. In this case, this is a type of contamination effect. However, experimental group members could feel special simply because they are in the experiment. The Hawthorne effect is named after a famous productivity experiment at the Hawthorne electric plant outside Chicago. Workers were moved to a special room for a study of the effects of lighting intensity and other work conditions on their productivity. After this move, the workers began to increase their output no matter what change was made in their working conditions, even when the conditions became worse. The researchers concluded that the workers felt they should work harder because they were part of a special experiment.

Criminal Justice

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Which of the following statements is true of life course theories?

A. They focus on the development of criminal careers and the different influences on individuals as they age. B. They examine the role that societal institutions, including the juvenile justice system, play in perpetuating delinquent behavior. C. They are concerned with the role that the government plays in creating an environment conducive to crime. D. They state that the reaction to delinquency is what causes it in the future and emphasize that system processing brings about continued delinquency. E. They emphasize that juveniles who are labeled delinquent or criminal will eventually commit secondary delinquent acts to live up to the label.

Criminal Justice

__________ is the study of our use of space and how differences in that use make us feel more relaxed or more anxious

A) Proxemics B) Body-dynamics C) Social-consultative D) Body language

Criminal Justice

The Amendment provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law

a. Fourth b. Fifth c. Sixth d. Eighth

Criminal Justice

Which of the following is not classified as a violent crime by the UCR?

a. burglary b. robbery c. aggravated assault d. murder e. forcible rape

Criminal Justice