Empirically supported treatments or type I errors? Problems with the analysis of data from group-administered treatments.

Abstract

When treatments are administered in groups, clients interact in ways that lead to violations of a key assumption of most statistical analyses-the assumption of independence of observations. The resulting dependencies, when not properly accounted for, can increase Type I errors dramatically. Of the 33 studies of group-administered treatment on the empirically supported treatments list, none appropriately analyzed their data. The current authors provide corrections that can be applied to improper analyses. After the corrections, only 12.4% to 68.2% of tests that were originally reported as significant remained significant, depending on what assumptions were made about how large the dependencies among observations really are. Of the 33 studies, 6-19 studies no longer had any significant results after correction. The authors end by providing recommendations for researchers planning group-administered treatment research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 209 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.