Question: Choose a health related research topic that is interesting to you. Find an experimental research study on this topic published in the last 1.5 years (January 2016 to now). To qualify for this assignment the study must be original research (not a review of previous studies) conducted with human participants, and include a behavior change experiment, which means that at least one group of participants had to receive some kind of ‘treatment' intended to change their behavior. There are a huge range of options you can choose from. Cross-sectional or descriptive studies won't work.
Write a critical analysis of the study. This should start with a short, high-level summary of the study's purpose, procedures, and main results (a few hundred words max). Then dive into the study. Some questions to consider:
· Do the authors make a clear case for the importance of the study that they're conducting? Summarize their justification.
· Were the study methods based on theory? Did the authors describe the theoretical underpinnings? Briefly describe the theoretical basis.
· Are there clear hypotheses?
· What was the study design? Was the design appropriate to answer the study's primary questions? Was there a control group, or a placebo control group? How could the study design have been stronger?
· What was the study population? Was the number of participants too small to draw firm conclusions? What characteristics of the sample may have biased the results, or may limit the generalization of the findings?
· Were the study methods adequate? How did the authors make sure that participants completed the intended ‘dose' of the treatment?
· Did the study fail to control for any important extraneous variables?
· What were the main results? Was the data analysis thorough? Did authors clearly present and discuss all the results of the study, or does it feel like they're ‘cherry picking' the results they want to include and omitting things that didn't work out the way they proposed?
· Did the authors appropriately interpret the results of their study? What did they overlook? Are there limitations of the study that they do not address in the discussion section?
· What are the implications of the study in terms of application in the real world, or in future research? Do the authors thoroughly describe the implications?