Do you ever have trouble getting to class on time or even at all? Some students certainly do, and, perhaps not surprisingly, they may find this difficulty affects their grade (Friedman, Rodriguez, & McComb, 2001). The reason I bring this up is that a group of researchers, Bicard, Lott, Mills, Bicard, and Baylot-Casey (2012), set out to help four college athletes attend class and get there on time. These particular students were in danger of failing out of school, so there was a real need to curb their problem behavior.
What did Bicard et al. do to help? Before they could try to fix the problem, they had to find out just how bad it was. They needed to know how often these students were missing class and how often they were late. As we'll discuss below, this is called establishing the baseline. Once the baseline has been established, then it is time to provide an intervention to attempt to change the behavior. Bicard et al. instructed the students to text their academic counselor right before they entered the classroom each day. This requirement improved attendance and punctuality for all the students. In fact, as a test of how well it worked, Bicard et al. stopped requiring the texts at the start of a new semester, and the students tended to revert back to their old ways, missing class or arriving late. Once the texting requirement was put back into place, they once again showed improved behavior.
What I have just described was the use of a small-N design. In this chapter we explore what small-N designs are, their history, and how they work.
What Are Small- N Designs?
Small-N designs, also referred to as single-participant or single-subject designs, are designed to aid participants in changing behavior. We call them small-N designs because they use small sample sizes (N refers to the size of your sample); only one participant or just a few participants are tested. We'll talk about how this works in a moment, but first note that in almost all the research we've discussed thus far in this textbook (except the case study technique), we've compared the performances of groups to each other.