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Assessment Effects in Educational and Psychosocial Intervention Trials: An Important but Often‐Overlooked Problem
Author(s) -
Song MiKyung,
Ward Sandra E.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
research in nursing and health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.836
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1098-240X
pISSN - 0160-6891
DOI - 10.1002/nur.21651
Subject(s) - intervention (counseling) , psychosocial , randomized controlled trial , outcome (game theory) , psychology , clinical trial , clinical psychology , medicine , psychotherapist , psychiatry , surgery , mathematics , mathematical economics , pathology
Baseline assessments and repeated measures are an essential part of educational and psychosocial intervention trials, but merely measuring an outcome of interest can modify that outcome, either by the measurement process alone or by interacting with the intervention to strengthen or weaken the intervention effects. Assessment effects can result in biased estimates of intervention effects and may not be controlled by the usual two‐group randomized controlled trial design. In this paper, we review the concept of assessment effects and other related phenomena, briefly describe study designs that estimate assessment effects separately from intervention effects and discuss their strengths and limitations, review evidence regarding the strength of assessment effects in intervention trials targeting behavior change, and discuss implications for intervention research. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.