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I am sitting in a graduate-level clinical science seminar at a public university in Southern California. The professor has a Ph.D in Clinical Psychology from a prestigious university. It is our third week of class and we are learning about clinical research methods. I am working on a master’s degree in psychological research and learn in this class how thoroughly disturbed I am by this discipline.
The professor is describing a research project she conducted during her doctoral training that led to numerous follow-up studies and remains one of her primary ongoing research projects.
The original project’s aim was to develop an effective treatment for childhood anxiety. Its sample was comprised of anxious children from two different elementary schools who were around the same age and varied in terms of ethnicity and gender.
What she found was that Latinx children were more responsive to the therapy at one elementary school but not the other. This led to numerous efforts to determine what it was about the Latinx children that made the intervention more effective. Was it some other factor that they hadn’t measured that was doing it? Was it the particular sample of Latinx children? She described all of the statistical analyses and follow-up studies that came after this one to try to figure this out. Her description was indeed a helpful overview of clinical research methods, but it was also a performance that sticks with me for other reasons.
