Dallery Jesse, Cassidy Rachel N, Raiff Bethany R
Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
J Med Internet Res. 2013 Feb 8;15(2):e22. doi: 10.2196/jmir.2227.
Technology-based interventions to promote health are expanding rapidly. Assessing the preliminary efficacy of these interventions can be achieved by employing single-case experiments (sometimes referred to as n-of-1 studies). Although single-case experiments are often misunderstood, they offer excellent solutions to address the challenges associated with testing new technology-based interventions. This paper provides an introduction to single-case techniques and highlights advances in developing and evaluating single-case experiments, which help ensure that treatment outcomes are reliable, replicable, and generalizable. These advances include quality control standards, heuristics to guide visual analysis of time-series data, effect size calculations, and statistical analyses. They also include experimental designs to isolate the active elements in a treatment package and to assess the mechanisms of behavior change. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues related to the generality of findings derived from single-case research and how generality can be established through replication and through analysis of behavioral mechanisms.
基于技术的促进健康干预措施正在迅速扩展。评估这些干预措施的初步疗效可以通过采用单病例实验（有时称为单受试者研究）来实现。尽管单病例实验常常被误解，但它们为应对与测试基于新技术的干预措施相关的挑战提供了出色的解决方案。本文介绍了单病例技术，并重点介绍了在开发和评估单病例实验方面取得的进展，这些进展有助于确保治疗结果可靠、可重复且可推广。这些进展包括质量控制标准、指导时间序列数据可视化分析的启发法、效应量计算和统计分析。它们还包括用于分离治疗方案中的活性成分以及评估行为改变机制的实验设计。本文最后讨论了与单病例研究结果的普遍性相关的问题，以及如何通过重复和行为机制分析来确立普遍性。
