Framework for Proof - Medical Recognition Hail Mary

[throwaya]

Hello everyone,

Please take the time to follow the link below. I have posted a PDF with my plan to try and approach this problem from a scientific front. Please let me know your thoughts.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByV1U20gpyd4MEtCc25WZVRGOXM/view?usp=sharing

[patmhalp]

Finally somebody with a scientific basis, maybe if enough of us participate we can actually convince people we aren't just a bunch of yahoo's, thank you for taking this professional route!

[PATMsufferer]

          Very nice design. I like the idea of controlling for the noise level of the different environments, and I agree that something like an exam does seem to be a good period to observe, since the participants would be a captive, quiet audience; however, to play devil's advocate, one might also object that an exam would be a stressful event for most people, and maybe the stress of the clock-winding down on an exam could cause people to cough or show other distressing behavior, not necessarily the presence of the person with PATM. People would also experience pressure not to cough during an exam since you're supposed to be quiet (i.e., they might inhibit their 'true' behavior in this more constrained environment). Also, it might not be ethical to interfere with people during something as consequential as an exam.
          Here's a slight variation on your design, which would require more time and effort, but might yield more definitive results:

          Find an office or classroom environment with at least 20-30 people who regularly use it (these 20-30 people need to be the same people throughout the experiment to control for within-subjects variation). Monitor this environment for, maybe, 1 hour per day (or however long a class might be) for 10 days to establish a baseline assessment of how many coughs and other PATM-type reactions typically occur within this group of people. After this 10 day control period, introduce someone with PATM into the environment and record reactions for another 10 days (1 hour per day at the same time as the control recordings). Remove the person with PATM and record the number of reactions in the environment for another 10 days. If you have ethical approval to do so, make video recordings of all of the observations so that coding of PATM reactions doesn’t have to be done in real-time and so that the codings can be verified by independent observers at a later time.
          To really ratchet-up the rigor of this experiment, it could be made double-blind by telling everyone involved (i.e., the 30 people in the office/classroom and the person with PATM) that only half of the days will actually be recorded. So during every 10 day assessment period, only 5 days are actually recorded, and none of the participants will know whether any particular day is being recorded or not. Also, have an uninvolved research assistant determine which days will be recorded, so that the experimenters don’t know which days are being recorded either. If you can go down this double-blind route, it might also be good to increase the number of days of observations (e.g., instead of observing people for 10 days per condition, observe for 30 (and only record 15), making it a 3-month long study).
          This study would be revealing, and if the experimenters went through the proper ethical channels, it could be publishable. Ethics requires that all participants give informed consent, or at least assent, to being observed, so the 20-30 people in the office/classroom need to know that their behavior is being recorded for a certain period of time (they, of course, won’t be told that we’re recording how many coughs or other reactions they produce – they need to be blind to our dependent measures). The person with PATM needs to be told that only half of the of observational period will be recorded and that the periods of recording will be determined randomly; this random assignment of recording periods lessens the ability of the person with PATM to manipulate the results of the experiment. The experimenters also need to be blind to when the recordings will take place, so that they don’t do anything to influence the results of the experiment during data collection. Also, during coding, the coders should not be told which condition of the experiment they’re coding (i.e., coders should be naïve people who simply are told: “Tally the number of coughs, throat-clearings, etc. that you observe in this video”; they should have no idea what the experimental conditions even are).
          If anybody out there in PATM-world is in a psychology or research design course in college and needs to conduct an experiment as part of a class project, a design like this might be doable (although labor-intensive).