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Single-Case Research Methods: History and Suitability for a Psychological Science in Need of Alternatives

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Abstract

This paper presents a historical and conceptual analysis of a group of research strategies known as the Single-Case Methods (SCMs). First, we present an overview of the SCMs, their history, and their major proponents. We will argue that the philosophical roots of SCMs can be found in the ideas of authors who recognized the importance of understanding both the generality and individuality of psychological functioning. Second, we will discuss the influence that the natural sciences’ attitude toward measurement and experimentation has had on SCMs. Although this influence can be traced back to the early days of experimental psychology, during which incipient forms of SCMs appeared, SCMs reached full development during the subsequent advent of Behavior Analysis (BA). Third, we will show that despite the success of SCMs in BA and other (mainly applied) disciplines, these designs are currently not prominent in psychology. More importantly, they have been neglected as a possible alternative to one of the mainstream approaches in psychology, the Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST), despite serious controversies about the limitations of this prevailing method. Our thesis throughout this section will be that SCMs should be considered as an alternative to NHST because many of the recommendations for improving the use of significance testing (Wilkinson & the TFSI, 1999) are main characteristics of SCMs. The paper finishes with a discussion of a number of the possible reasons why SCMs have been neglected.

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Notes

  1. This number should be interpreted carefully because not all the disciplines have the common practice of reporting the details of the experimental designs in the sections of the article that the databases use for indexing purposes (e.g., keywords or abstract); similarly, the search terms that we utilized may be considered too narrow. However, a recent and more in depth search by Smith (2012) conducted only in PsycINFO for the same period 2000–2010 provided a very similar number of records, 571 articles, despite the fact the author used a wider range of terms and phrases (e.g., alternating treatment design, multiple baseline design, time-series design). Although a more thorough analysis is clearly required to provide stronger evidence in favour or against the prominence of SCMs, one that unfortunately goes beyond the scope of this paper, it seems reasonable to assume that a more precise estimation would still be considered small given the massive number of journals indexed in the databases that were searched (PsycINFO and SCOPUS).

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Aaro Toomela, João Antonio Monteiro, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and thoughtful comments.

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Correspondence to Camilo Hurtado-Parrado.

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An earlier version of this paper was prepared while the first author was sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through the postgraduate scholarships program.

Part of this paper was presented during the Sixth International Conference of the Association for Behavior Analysis (November, 2011, Granada, Spain).

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Hurtado-Parrado, C., López-López, W. Single-Case Research Methods: History and Suitability for a Psychological Science in Need of Alternatives. Integr. psych. behav. 49, 323–349 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9290-2

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