Video games have been used for pain management by doctors and therapists who believe that the attention required to play a video game can distract the player and thereby decrease the sensation of pain. The paper “Video Games and Health” (British Medical Journal [2005]:122–123) states: “However, there has been no long term follow-up and no robust randomized controlled trials of such interventions. Whether patients eventually tire of such games is also unclear. Furthermore, it is not known whether any distracting effect depends simply on concentrating on an interactive task or whether the content of games is also an important factor as there have been no controlled trials comparing video games with other distracters. Further research should examine factors within games such as novelty, users’ preferences, and relative levels of challenge and should compare video games with other potentially distracting activities.”

1. Working with a partner, select one of the areas of potential research suggested in the passage from the paper and formulate a specific question that could be addressed by performing an experiment.

2. Propose an experiment that would provide data to address the question from Step 1. Be specific about how subjects might be selected, what the experimental conditions (treatments) would be, and what response would be measured.

3. At the end of Section 2.3 there are 10 questions that can be used to evaluate an experimental design. Answer these 10 questions for the design proposed in Step 2.

4. After evaluating your proposed design, are there any changes you would like to make to your design? Explain.

Data from Section 2.3.

Before proceeding with an experiment, you should be able to give a satisfactory answer to each of the following 10 questions.

1. What is the research question that data from the experiment will be used to answer?

2. What is the response variable?

3. How will the values of the response variable be determined?

4. What are the factors (explanatory variables) for the experiment?

5. For each factor, how many different values are there, and what are these values?

6. What are the treatments for the experiment?

7. What extraneous variables might influence the response?

8. How does the design incorporate random assignment of subjects to treatments (or  treatments to subjects) or random assignment of treatments to trials?

9. For each extraneous variable listed in Question 7, how does the design protect against its potential influence on the response through blocking, direct control, or randomization?

10. Will you be able to answer the research question using the data collected in this  experiment?