Home Therapy and Group Therapy: The Treatment of Conduct Disorder - Essay Example

The main method of collecting data in this research will be direct observation. The researcher will observe the patients who form the sample group, to identify any conduct disorder. The instances of the observed conduct disorder (if any) will be recorded. Contrary to the requirements of ordinary scientific studies, this type of research doesn’t require any control group. For this reason, most of the experimental designs will hardly fit in this study. The most appropriate experimental design for this kind of study would be direct observation since the symptoms of the conduct disorders are observable (Kenneth & Bruce, 2014). The observation method supports the use of a between-subjects research design.

In this research, the target population is composed of the patients who underwent conduct disorder treatment, either through the group or home therapy methods. Due to the nature of the target population, each member should be given an equal opportunity to form the sample group. This is because the treatments that each of the members underwent were similar. In this research, therefore, the sampling technique will be simple random sampling. This technique will give each of the members equal chances of being selected to form the sample group.

The sample size will be made up of 30 participants, in an equal number, across the two treatment methods. 15 participants will be randomly selected as representatives, depending on the method of conduct disorder they were subjected to. The nature of this study is comparative in nature (Thorndike & E. L. 1913). For this reason, as opposed to ordinary scientific research, this study would not require splitting the sample group into control and experimental groups (Lacort & M. O, 2014). The study compares the effectiveness of the home and group treatments for the treatment of conduct disorders. For this reason, in this study, the observations will be made on the persons treated under each category of treatment.