Highlights
Overview
This project is designed to give you an opportunity to not only put some of the individual skills you have learnt into practice, but also put them together in a cohesive analysis and report format. The role you are playing in carrying out this project is as a research psychologist, part of a team that has just undertaken an empirical study, and thus you now need to undertake an appropriate statistical analysis to address several a priori research questions. The overall purpose of this project is to give you the opportunity to determine how to translate a psychological research question into a statistical analysis, and then to translate the statistical findings into answers to the original research question.
Background
Pain is arguably one of the most debilitating of human sensations given its clear association with decreased quality-of-life (Katz, 2002). Individuals who suffer from chronic pain conditions often suffer comorbid elevated anxiety and a tendency to catastrophise, which may exacerbate their experience of pain. This has been demonstrated in a number of pain-related conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome (Lackner & Quigley, 2005). Curiously, randomised controlled trials of both pharmacological therapies and psychological therapies often report high rates of response to therapy in the placebo arm of the trial. This is problematic because it suggests a mechanism of action that is unexpected and hence a limitation on our understanding of the science involved. It is also problematic since the effect size in a placebo randomized controlled trial is usually calculated as the active arm response minus the placebo arm response. If the placebo response is large that can result in a small effect size regardless of how large the active arm response is. Understanding the magnitude of placebo effect and any insights we can obtain into possible mechanisms would therefore be both theoretically and practically useful.
Research Questions
1. Some clinicians believe that therapeutic benefit may derive not only from the active component of the therapy but the duration of therapy. In particular, it is believed by
many that longer duration of therapy may enhance expectancy of therapy, which translates into better patient outcome in the placebo/nocebo conditions. Determine
whether there is evidence to support this belief by reporting on whether the duration of therapy alters the difference between therapy groups (group) with respect to change in somatic symptom score (chg_sss). In particular we are interested in whether the difference between sham placebo and neutral conditions and the difference
between sham nocebo and neutral conditions are altered by duration of therapy (durnrx).
2. Understanding factors that account for variance in placebo response with respect to change in quality-of-life (chg_qol)
a. How well does the combination of psychological and demographic constructs (see Table 1) explain change in quality-of-life? Are any of these factors redundant as predictors, and if so which? Do any of these predictors appear to have substantially stronger effects than others in predicting change in quality-of- life, and if so which? Note that model reduction is not required for this question.
You just need to use whatever metrics you have learned to indicate which variables might be redundant, which are contributing relatively little to the explained variance and which are contributing substantially.
b. What is the unique explained variance in chg_qol response for the combined psychological constructs after controlling for the combined demographic constructs?
c. What is the unique explained variance in chg_qol response for the combined demographic constructs after controlling for the combined psychological constructs.
d. Comment on the degree of shared explained variance in chg_qol by psychological and demographic constructs.
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