title: Single-case experimental designs to evaluate novel technology-based health interventions.
abstract: Technology-based interventions to promote health are expanding rapidly. Assessing the preliminary efficacy of these interventions can be achieved by employing single-case experiments (sometimes referred to as n-of-1 studies). Although single-case experiments are often misunderstood, they offer excellent solutions to address the challenges associated with testing new technology-based interventions. This paper provides an introduction to single-case techniques and highlights advances in developing and evaluating single-case experiments, which help ensure that treatment outcomes are reliable, replicable, and generalizable. These advances include quality control standards, heuristics to guide visual analysis of time-series data, effect size calculations, and statistical analyses. They also include experimental designs to isolate the active elements in a treatment package and to assess the mechanisms of behavior change. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues related to the generality of findings derived from single-case research and how generality can be established through replication and through analysis of behavioral mechanisms.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA. dallery@ufl.edu
authors: Jesse
authors: J
authors: Dallery
authors: Rachel N
authors: RN
authors: Cassidy
authors: Bethany R
authors: BR
authors: Raiff
mesh_terms: D015438:Health Behavior; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D011786:Quality Control; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012107:Research Design; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D016896:Treatment Outcome
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