Recently, the media widely reported findings that prayer causes the “speedy recovery” of hospital patients. To make such a claim, what type of research design would need to be utilized?
It's definitely not Naturalistic Observation, so I won't even mention that.
Case Study Design
-Studying one person or a small number of people for an extended period of time.
-Common with rare types of brain damage or mental illness.
-Helpful in providing existence proofs, but can be misleading or anecdotal.
Correlational Design
-Examine how 2 variables are related
-Correlation vary from -1 to +1 and can be:
1)Positive(as one increases, so does the other)
2)Negative
3)Zero
I'm pretty sure it's Case Study Design, but I can kinda see how Correlational Design could work, like finding correlation between the people that were prayed on and the people that got better quickly. Although, I think that would fall under "illusory Correlation".
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