A One-Way Analysis of Variance for Single-Subject Designs

Abstract

IN Psychology, there has been a long standing conflict between single-subject and multisubject researchers, which tends to center about the question of whether or not statistics is really useful in single-subject research. Such writers as. Sidman (1961) and Skinner (1953) emphasize precisely controlled, single-subject experiments as the most fruitful experimental approach in Psychology, with the role of statistics being limited to the use of elementary descrip-tive statistics such as means and standard deviations. The powerful, multivariate methods of modern statistics are considered to be inap-plicable because they are primarily designed to deal with groups instead of individuals and because their averaging out processes tend to obscure individual differences. Other writers, such as Un-derwood (1957), argue that the best experimental approach in Psy-chology is to study groups of subjects to which the modern statis-tical inference methods may be applied. The purpose of the present