LibGuides: Art Therapy (Graduate): Understanding & evaluating information

Types of studies

Research method	Advantages	Disadvantages
Survey	Yields a lot of information Provides a good way to generate hypotheses Can provide information about many people since it’s cheap and easy to do	Provides information about behavior that can’t be observed directly Relies on self-report data, which can be misleading Doesn’t allow conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships Sometimes gives incomplete information Sometimes relies only on self-report data, which can be misleading
Case study	Provides a good way to generate hypotheses Yields data that other methods can’t provide	Can be subjective and thus may yield biased results Doesn’t allow conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships Sometimes yields biased results
Naturalistic observation	Can be useful for generating hypotheses Provides information about behavior in the natural environment	May be difficult to do unobtrusively Doesn’t allow conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships Sometimes yields biased results
Laboratory observation	Enables use of sophisticated equipment for measuring and recording behavior Can be useful for generating hypotheses	Carries the risk that observed behavior is different from natural behavior Doesn’t allow conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships
Test	Gives information about characteristics such as personality traits, emotional states, aptitudes, interests, abilities, values, and behaviors	Requires good reliability and validity before it can be used Doesn’t allow conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships
Experiment	Identifies cause-and-effect relationships Distinguishes between placebo effects and real effects of a treatment or drug	Can be artificial, so results may not generalize to real-world situations

SparkNotes. (n.d.) Research methods in psychology (Chart). Retrieved from http://www.sparknotes.com/psychology/psych101/researchmethods/section3/page/3/

Evidence-based practice

Evidence-based practice (EBP) principles are being adopted by many professions related to the creative therapies, including: medicine; nursing; social work; and education.

The EBP model is built on five steps.

Ask: Formulate an answerable question
Acquire: Use information resources to search for evidence
Appraise: Evaluate the evidence in terms of its validity, impact, and applicability to your question
Apply: Use the best evidence for your situation, in alignment with local values and your professional expertise
Assess: Evaluate the effectiveness of the application

Generally speaking, the realibility and value placed on different types of information according to an EBP paradigm will be ranked thus:

Image source: JoWilson13. Literature searching for health promotion 2013 (slideshow). Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/JoWilson13/literature-searching-for-health-promotion-2013

As you work your way from less- to more-reliable, you will notice that the size of data sets and the evaluations and comparisons within them increase. A meta-analysis will study hundreds or thousands of individual cases, which allows for overarching trends to emerge. Individual case studies may not always enable the researcher to determine which characteristics are typical of similar cases and which characteristics pertain only to that particular case.

Understanding medical sources

The CRAP Test --> Lateral Reading

There are a lot of factors to consider when you are determining the trustworthiness -- the “credibility” -- of a source or a piece of information, regardless of where you find it.

We used to use the CRAP test to avoid ending up trusting, well, crap. And even though we have to think about more than just these factors, these questions still give us a solid start.

Currency - How old is it, and is that information likely to be outdated by now?

Reliability - Does this publisher or website have a solid reputation?

Authority - Does the person or persons who created it actually know what they’re talking about on this topic?

Purpose - Are these people trying to convince me of something, or do they have an agenda they are trying to push?

Lateral reading is the key to getting answers to these questions when you are evaluating information that you find on the “open web” (that is, the content on the internet that isn’t selected and provided to you by a trusted tool like a library database).

In the case of AI-generated answers and content, there may not even be publishers or authors, per se, and the currency and bias of the material is dependent on whatever dataset the AI tool is using, which may not always be clear. So when content was created by AI, or when you can’t tell who created the content or where it came from, it’s important to confirm the factual claims themselves by confirming them using other, trustworthy sources. Then use those trustworthy sources for your research.

A few miscellaneous cautions as you venture out:

Don’t be tricked into thinking that because a site contains a LOT of information that the information is necessarily good.
Bias ≠ agenda. Everyone has a bias, which is just how they see things; an agenda is what they are trying to DO (like push a particular narrative).
Don’t always take the top hit from your search results. Skim the list of results and choose one from a trustworthy site, if possible.
Be aware that AI will make up fake citations and sources for its information if you ask it to cite its sources. When in doubt, google the citation to see if it’s legit.