You're going to have trouble finding an "actual" treatment out there that isn't believed in by somebody in your audience or someone in their immediate family. I have done the same thing you are proposing by inventing a treatment that I demonstrate on myself in class. It's called the "ganzfeld treatment" and works well because it is a real term from perceptual psychology and it is easy to generate a therapeutic/pseudo-scientific rationale for its application (patients need to clear the sensorium, experience perceptual re-birth, etc.) It involves wearing two half ping-pong balls (easily available at most campus area convenience stores around here for some reason) over my eyes while I speak. The image is entertaining and the students tend to remember the class in evaluations. I then go through the methods of testing the effectiveness of the treatment, as you are planning to do.
Also, it is fun to demonstrate the ganzfeld effect with the ping pong balls as a real phenomenon. Bill Scott >>> Michael Britt <[email protected]> 02/09/09 10:26 AM >>> I wonder if anyone had any suggestions for me. I'm planning an episode in which I want to talk about research design and various confounds and threats to validity (a la Campbell) and I want to use an example of a treatment (the "X" in Campbell's terminology) that we know doesn't work. I was going to use teaching methods that attempt to incorporate learning styles, but that's a hot topic, upon which not everyone agrees so I'd rather not use it because I don't want the treatment that I use as an example to distract from the topic of research design. I suppose I could just make something up but thought I'd check to see if anyone had any ideas. Appreciate it, Michael Michael Britt [email protected] www.thepsychfiles.com --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected]) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
