Problem: Consider the following scenario and then answer the questions below.
You are a behavior analyst who was hired as a consultant to help a local company increase their product sales. After conducting preliminary assessments, you decide to introduce a treatment that offers employees monetary incentives for the number of products they sell per week. They can earn 10% of each sale they make during the week, and the money is added to their weekly paycheck. You decide to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention by recording and graphing the number of products sold by each employee for a month (baseline) and then introducing the intervention. You will continue to measure the number of products sold during the weeks that the intervention is in place, and then you will remove the intervention and record the number of products sold without the intervention again (return to baseline). Need Assignment Help?
When you implemented the plan, here is what the data looked like for two of the employees:
Employee #1:
Employee #2:
Questions:
Did the intervention appear to work (i.e., cause an increase in sales) for either (or both) of the employees? Discuss your answer in terms of the trends, variability, and levels of the data paths for each employee.
(Hint: Keep in mind that the demonstration of an experimental effect in a reversal design is based on (1) a clear change in either the trend and/or level of the data between baseline and treatment phases that also (2) reverses upon return to baseline conditions and (3) does not show extreme variability of data within a condition.)
The manager of the business told you that she had assigned an assistant to help the first employee sell products during the weeks that the intervention was in place. Would this pose a threat to your conclusions about whether the treatment was effective for employee #1? If so, what type of threat (i.e., internal validity, external validity, reliability, social validity, etc.)?