Research strategies for meaningful rehabilitation research.

Abstract

The two most recent editors of Rehabilitation Psychology offer reflections and opinions concerning some shortcomings of rehabilitation research manuscripts they have examined in the past decade. They propose that rehabilitation psychology research can yield many more useful answers than have emerged thus far if researchers attend more closely to the following: (a) Select manipulable or potentially manipulable independent variables, (b) Employ variables that are directly related to the behavior of interest, (c) Use research designs and analyses that allow demonstration of appropriate control of variables, (d) Describe numerical data in ways that reveal what scores mean, (e) Supplement grouped data with finer grain analysis, (f) Report the real life significance of comparisons that are statistically significant. Emphasis was placed on the importance of beginning a study with psychological hypotheses, psychological concepts, and psychological phenomena in preference to present, frequent utilization of physical, temporal, geographical or other nonpsychological orientations.