A pharmaceutical company has asked you to design a study to ...

[Yi-Chen]

A pharmaceutical company has asked you to design a study to evaluate the effectiveness of a new drug for treating bulimia. They have asked you specifically to do case studies. You are writing a memo in reply to this request in which you explain what case
 
  studies can do for the project, but also what they cannot do. Include a brief description of the components you would add to the study to make it more useful in testing a theory..

Question 2

Describe the benefits and drawbacks of the use of case studies in research on psychopathology.
 
  Need to turn this in tomorrow

[blakcmamba]

Answer to Question 1

Answer: (1) Case studies can suggest a research direction and give hints about theory, but they can't actually tell much about cause and effect. A hypothesis can be derived from a case study and a few case studies can suggest that a more experimental project would be worthwhile. It would be valuable to follow several cases to see if the new drug does in fact reduce their symptoms. (2) In order to actually know something about cause and effect, however, it is necessary to conduct a controlled experiment. For this you would need a larger group of subjects, one-third of whom were given

Answer to Question 2

Answer: (1) Benefits: rich clinical descriptions (symptoms displayed, manner in which symptoms emerged, developmental and family history, response to any treatment efforts), especially important if the disorder is rare (e.g., multiple personality disorder and transsexualism); can be used to generate hypotheses; associated details can give clues about the nature of mental illness. (2) Drawbacks: can be viewed from many different perspectives and competing explanations may be equally plausible; risky to draw general conclusions from a single case.

[Yi-Chen]

Thank you!

[blakcmamba]

Happy to help