Threats to Validity in an Experimental Design. Essay

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threats to validity in an experimental design. Your response should include an evaluation of the choice of design, the author's rationale for the design choice, the types of validity presented and the critical differences among them, the author's performance in explaining them, and how you would assess the study's validity and the information you would require to do so.

Choice of research design:

The efficacy of female condom skills training in HIV risk reduction among women

Randomized clinical trials are often considered the 'gold standard' of good medical research. This is because randomized trials make use of an experimental and control group and the randomization process is designed to eliminate possible selection bias, which causes correlative rather than correlative factors to potentially skew results. In the case of Choi (et al. 2008) according to the study "The efficacy of female condom skills training in HIV risk reduction among women" a "randomized trial with a sample of 409 U.S. women" was used "to test the hypothesis that female condom skills training would be efficacious in increasing sustained use of female condoms and protected sex." The randomization was stratified by the location of the different members of the test population (all of whom were attending family planning clinics in various areas of Northern California) and by race and ethnicity, to ensure each randomized group was a representative sampling of the average population and factors more likely to be present amongst a certain racial or ethnic group did not have an undue influence on the final outcome.

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The study made use of an experimental design because it specifically wanted to isolate the effects of skill training using a female condom. Women in the experimental group received training; those that did not received none, and there was a statistically significant impact derived from education in female condom use that encouraged women to use the devices. Male condom use in both the experimental and control groups remained unchanged (Cho et al. 2008: 1845). The design seems appropriate, given using a descriptive study would have had too many outside factors impacting results (i.e., women who had received education in female condom use, a relatively unusual form of birth control, would likely have been from a niche demographic and thus socio-economic and cultural factors that were correlative rather than causal could influence the outcome). A qualitative study would not have shown with scientific rigor that….....

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