Understanding high quality research designs for speech language pathology

Abstract

As innovative methods, strategies, or curriculum are introduced to assist clients with speech and language disorders, many Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) may question the effectiveness of the intervention and more specifically whether the results that they are seeing are the result of the intervention (i.e., cause/effect). Several research designs allow researchers to examine causality including the most widely known, the randomized controlled trial (RCT). While not all situations are suited to applying the RCT, other high quality designs may be used that still lend evidence of causality even when randomization is not possible. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief summary and illustrations of randomized controlled trials (RCT) and quasi-experimental design (QED) that are appropriate for the study of treatment effectiveness in speech-language pathology research, present potential barriers to quality randomization, and provide guidelines to help identify RCTs.

Keywords:

• randomization
• randomized controlled trial
• quasi-experiment
• research design
• causality

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The author alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.