Experimental Design Feasible? Why or Why Not?

¶ … experimental design feasible? Why or why not?

• What suggestions can you make for future studies of the DARE program?

The aims of DARE are long-term in nature, namely to encourage students to not abuse drugs over the course of their lifetimes. The only way to test this aim is to conduct a longitudinal study of a representative body of DARE graduates over at least a twenty-year period, to see if the intervention had a lasting effect upon their drug use habits. The control groups would be a group of students from similar demographics and geographical locations who did not have DARE or any other anti-drug program in their schools and a group of students who experienced an anti-drug education intervention substantially different than DARE. The selection of students would have to be balanced in terms of factors such as race, gender, and neighborhood, given that graduates of DARE programs might be more apt to come from either more or less affluent locations than their non-DARE peers.

This is a feasible experimental design because it takes place in the 'real world,' without the need for artificially-imposed constraints. It also contains a control group, which is vitally necessary to ensure that causality is established, not mere correlation (Maxwell & Babbie 2011). So long as the control and experimental groups are variable and genuinely similar, the presence of absence of a DARE program is the only significant variable that should or should not indicate the development of negative behavioral patterns towards drugs. A previous study of 1,000 twenty-year-olds who went through the DARE program did not yield promising results: "20-year-olds who'd had DARE classes were no less likely to have smoked marijuana or cigarettes, drunk alcohol, used illicit drugs like cocaine or heroin, or caved in to peer pressure than kids who'd never been exposed to DARE" and even had lower self-esteem (frequently associated with drug use)" but a larger sampling with a more diverse control group might possibly yield different results (Reaves 2001). Also, this comparative study did not assess the efficacy of DARE in comparison with other anti-drug campaigns, merely those who did not experience an intervention at all.

Reference

Maxfield, M.G. & Babbie, E.R. (2011). Research methods for criminal justice and criminology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Reaves, J. (2001). Just say No to DARE. Time Magazine. Retrieved:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,99564,00.html

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of the sampling methods used in these two studies?

• How might you use this data to develop an experimental design?

The study "AIDS-Related Written Court Decisions in Federal and State Courts, 1984-1989: [United States]" assessed all court decisions within this specific period of time involving AIDS, including cases in which the plaintiff or defendant had AIDS. It assessed such factors as size and resources of plaintiff vs. defendant; respective power roles; which decisions made reference to constitutional values, to equal treatment, and so forth. Obviously, not all cases involving AIDS are rights-based cases, but an experimental study could be constructed to determine the extent to which cases involving persons with AIDS (either plaintiffs or defendants) that hinged upon certain conceptual modalities such as constitutional rights were decided in favor or against persons with AIDS. Obviously, many cases in which one or more participant had AIDS might not solely revolve around this issue, so further segmentation of the data would be necessary.