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Ex Post Facto Research

Ex post facto designs examine how an independent variable that is present prior to the study, such as a medical condition or trait, affects a dependent variable. These studies do not use random assignment of participants to groups. Instead, they identify naturally occurring groups and follow them over time (prospective) or examine their histories (retrospective). While less able to determine causality than randomized experiments, ex post facto designs are sometimes necessary for ethical reasons when the independent variable cannot be manipulated. However, the lack of random assignment means these studies are prone to inherent confounding variables between groups.

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627 views2 pages

Ex Post Facto Research

Ex post facto designs examine how an independent variable that is present prior to the study, such as a medical condition or trait, affects a dependent variable. These studies do not use random assignment of participants to groups. Instead, they identify naturally occurring groups and follow them over time (prospective) or examine their histories (retrospective). While less able to determine causality than randomized experiments, ex post facto designs are sometimes necessary for ethical reasons when the independent variable cannot be manipulated. However, the lack of random assignment means these studies are prone to inherent confounding variables between groups.

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Anonymous JaUcX95
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Ex Post Facto Defined

Sometimes you want to study things you can't control - things you can't ethically or physically control.
For instance, you can't make someone overweight to study the effects it has on their brain. You can't
alter someone's eyesight to see how it affects their motor skills.
Ex post facto design is a quasi-experimental study examining how an independent variable,
present prior to the study, affects a dependent variable. So like we just said, there is something about
the participant that we're going to study that we don't have to alter in the participant. We will make
this a little clearer a little later with some examples and descriptions.
But first, quasi-experimental simply means participants are not randomly assigned. In a true
experiment, you have what is called random assignment, which is where a participant has an equal
chance of being in the experimental or control group. Random assignment helps ensure that when
you apply some kind of condition to the experimental and control groups, there isn't some
predisposition in one group to respond differently than the other.
A true experiment and ex post facto both are attempting to say: this independent variable is causing
changes in a dependent variable. This is the basis of any experiment - one variable is hypothesized
to be influencing another. This is done by having an experimental group and a control group. So if
you're testing a new type of medication, the experimental group gets the new medication, while the
control group gets the old medication. This allows you to test the efficacy of the new medication.
Ex post facto designs are different from true experiments because ex post facto designs do not use
random assignment. True experiments have random assignment because you're looking at
something else. In ex post facto, you are looking at a prior variable present in the participant.

Ex-post-facto designs ("after the fact")


Much less able to determine causality than true experiments but these are necessary and
important research designs.
Necessity for:1. ethical reasons or 2. an interest in organismic variables
Two main types:
Prospective and Retrospective designs: find naturally occurring groups (thus, "after the fact") and
follow them forward (prospective) or trace their histories (retrospective)

Problems:

1.

subjects are not randomly assigned to treatments, as a result there will be inherent
confounds in the populations studied (this is the most serious problem)

2.

sampling problems (often a convenient sample):

3.

dropouts in prospective studies

4.

detection bias (equally likely to detect in both groups?)

Partial solutions:
Matching:
1) subject for subject (preferable but more difficult) or
2) distribution by distribution

in both cases can selectively drop individuals and bias the sample further

Measuring: so will:
1) know if potential confounds (uncontrolled or extraneous variables) are confounded, &
2) to statistically control for these variables (See later sections on multiple regression and partial
correlations)
Retrospective studies have additional problems in that they rely on memory so the partial
solutions are more difficult to employ successfully
Have the advantage (over prosepective designs) in that they are more efficient (cheaper and
faster) May be necessary with very rare grouping variables of interest (e.g., rare diseases)
Note that even with measurement and matching, internal validity is still questionable. [The
additional problems of retrospective designs are well illustrated by McFarland's (1988) study of
cyclical variability in moods)].

DVs used in Ex-post-facto studies

relative risk ratio (prospective studies) - illustrated by breast cancer data

relative odds ratio (approximates the relative risk) -- retrospective studies

Problem with both in that absolute risks are hidden, both (absolute and relative risks) should be
reported.

Causality and ex-post-facto designs. Although no one (or few) quasi-analytic experiment will
unambiguously s

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