Quasi-experiment, matched groups

Children of mothers who abused alcohol during pregnancy often have visual and auditory (hearing) attention deficits. Researchers at San Diego State University explored the pattern of the attention problems in hopes of finding ways to improve the alcohol-exposed children's ability to pay attention in the classroom.(1)

They studied 20 alcohol-exposed 9- to 12-year olds compared with 20 matched control participants. The mothers of the exposed group had consumed as much as a fifth of alcohol per day during prenancy. The outcome measures were engagement, disengagement, and shifts in attention during a series of discrimination tasks.

This is a quasi-experiment because the children were NOT randomly assigned to the alcohol and non-alcohol conditions.

It is also a good example of a matched group research design, which affects the selection of the statistical formula for assessing whether or not there was difference between the two groups in the task performance (there will be more on that later in the statistics module).

Return to module