Imagine you are a speech-language pathologist, and you are asked to discuss the importance of therapy for persons with aphasia at a meeting for insurance companies. The insurance companies want to hear from you how you can know that therapy works for clients with aphasia.How do we know that therapy works? One way is to look at research studies. In CMD 419 we have learned that not all the research studies that we discuss are presenting the same quality results. Sometimes this is because certain design features (e.g., experimental vs. control groups, or because of the number of participants) are present or absent. Your assignment is to choose from the two studies and select the one that shows the insurance companies the highest validity and reliability of its content. Please include 2 examples from one of the papers that support your choiceUsing  the two articles: Murray, L. (2012). Attention and other cognitive deficits in aphasia: Presence and relation to language and communication measures. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 21, 51-84.Breitenstein, C., Grewe, T., Flöel, A., Ziegler, W., Springer, L., Martus, P., Huber, W., Willmes, K., Ringelstein, B., Haeusler, G., Abel, S., Glindemann, R., Domahs, F., Regenbrecht, F., Schlenck, J., Thomas, M., Obrig, H., de Langen, E., Rocker, R., Wigbers, F., Rühmkorf, C., Hempen, I., List, J., & Baumgaertner, A. (2017). Intensive speech and language therapy in patients with chronic aphasia after stroke: a randomised, open-label, blinded-endpoint, controlled trial in a health-care setting. The Lancet, 389, 1528-1538.

Here are some notes the professor left for the entire class:

Following are some comments about the 2nd writing assignment. The assignment asked you to select one of two studies that was best able to demonstrate the positive effect of therapy for aphasia in a way that demonstrated scientific rigor. This evidence needed to be strong so that it would convince an imaginary insurance company to be willing and pay for such therapy.

This assignment asked you for the second time to separate the content of a study from the research design of the study. Both time you were not asked to describe the content of the study, but find and explain research design features that were used in such a way to increase the study’s scientific rigor.

The Murray (2012) study compared participants with aphasia and matched peers on a variety of cognitive skills, such as attention. Neither group received treatment or was assessed for clinical purposes. If you wrote mostly about the content of this paper (e.g., how many participants were in the study), you described the study. This description does not explain any design features and how they contributed to scientific rigor.

Also, this study could not convince an insurance company to pay for aphasia therapy because the researcher (Murray) did not set out to demonstrate the effectiveness of one or other treatment.

In contrast, in the Breitenstein et al. (2017), therapy is offered to 158 participants who have chronic aphasia. Please, make sure that you spell names of authors correctly.

The Breitenstein et al. study did set out to measure the effectiveness of an intense, but short period of therapy for participants with aphasia. In the title we can read that the design of the study is in the form of a clinical trial, a design that is experimental and comes as close to a cause-effect design as possible in behavioral studies. Also in the title, we can read what all design features were used to make it a clinical trial:

a randomized, open-label, blinded-endpoint, controlled trial with 158 participants

These were all design features that possibly raised the scientific rigor but mentioning them in your paper is not enough.

Large sample size results tend to revert to the mean which more likely mean that the data are normally distributed and can be analyzed with more powerful statistics.

Large sample size that was randomly assigned to groups makes that the groups only differ on the IV. This makes the results more robust and meaningful (pseudo cause and effect). Both groups showed similar positive effects from the therapy, each at separate times.

Large sample size with wide age range, different types of aphasia from different diagnoses, different levels of severity. This means that the results are generalizable to many more persons within the population of persons with aphasia.

There was independent monitoring of the data that were not part of the study, which prevents from researcher bias (objective observations) at any point with respect to the data.

Computer generated program to randomize which decreases human bias (human observations can risk  subjective/personal involvement).

Blinding of researchers: the researchers didn’t know which data set belonged to what group, reduction of researcher bias.

There were many more design features that you could choose from , and many of you did.

Here are some separate comments to keep in mind for the future:

Lower case: speech-language pathologist (SLP; only the acronym is in capitals), aphasia

Not all strokes or brain injury result in aphasia