A clinical psychologist wants to test a treatment to reduce the self-injury behavior of an autistic child. She faces an ethical
dilemma of needing to remove a potentially beneficial treatment to establish its effectiveness. In order to conduct an experiment that would allow causal inferences but also eliminate her ethical dilemma, the psychologist should conduct ________.
A case study is a kind of study used in social sciences in which the researcher observes an individual/group/event in a very in-depth manner. Case studies give a lot of information about the person or group who is being studied and let the researcher make causal inferences (because of the in-depth observation) and the researcher gets a better understanding of the situation.
In this question, the psychologist faces an ethical dilemma of needing to remove a potentially beneficial treatment. However, using a case study, she wouldn't need to do so because she could observe the autistic child in his environment without changing it, because the case study is an observing explanatory study. Therefore, the ethical dilemma would be eliminated and she could draw conclusions from the study.
