Question

To assess the impact of child abuse upon later criminality, Dr. Rose chose to select some adults whose names appeared as child abuse victims in local police records and another group of adults who were not victims of abuse. What technique is being employed?

Answer 1

Answer: NON-EQUIVALENT GROUP DESIGN.

Explanation: A nonequivalent group design is a quasi‐experiment used to assess the relative effects of treatments that have been assigned to groups of participants non-randomly (adults whose name appeared in the local police report as child abuse victims, and those have never been victims). Because the participants have been assigned to treatments non-randomly by Dr. Rose, differences in the composition of the treatment groups can bias the estimates of the treatment effects. A variety of statistical methods are available for taking account of this selection bias. Each method imposes different assumptions about the nature of the selection effects, but it can be difficult to determine which set of assumptions is most appropriate in a given research setting.