In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down several key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is generally considered to have been instrumental in ending most forms of racial discrimination in voting, especially in the southern states. Illustrate how you would employ a time-series design to study the impact of the Voting Rights Act on rates of black voter registration in the South. In designing your study, address the following questions:
In a peer-reviewed social science journal, locate an article that uses a cross-sectional design and provide the following information:
Consider a hypothetical study designed to address a practical problem in medical care for indigent people-indigents who suffer from hypochondriasis which the 2013 release of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders subsequently divided into somatic symptom disorder and illness anxiety disorder. Hypochondriacs, as they were once referred to, are particularly an issue where people receive cheap or free medical care and where there is little incentive not to make frequent appointments to see a doctor, even though the complaints are minor.
Say we have a sizable pool of people who receive free health care at a large metropolitan hospital. Someone comes up with a way to help relieve the system of part of the load created by multiple visits of hypochondriacs: furnish them a hotline where they can get medical advice quickly, easily, and on a 24-hour-per-day basis. The hotline will be operated by interns who have been specially trained and selected to be sympathetic listeners. (This is necessary because we suspect that many hypochondriacs really are looking for someone to listen to their problems.)
For the test period, we will open the hotline only to 50 patients who have been identified by doctors as extreme examples of "hypochondriasis." The subjects are thus selected on the criterion that they are the worst cases available. These 50 are given the hotline number and information on how it works. At the end of a 12-month test, researchers go back to patient records to look for a change in the number of visits made to the doctor. It turns out that the 50 made a mean of 1.6 visits during the 12-month test. During the 12 months before the hotline was opened, this same group visited an average of 4.3 times. On the basis of this difference, the researchers conclude that the hotline did indeed reduce the number of visits.
Consider how the researchers may have made a logical error in attributing the drop to the hotline program. How might the results be explained by: