A pharmaceutical company has asked you to design a study to evaluate the effectiveness of a new drug for treating bulimia. They have asked you specifically to do case studies. You are writing a memo in reply to this request in which you explain what case studies can do for the project, but also what they cannot do. Include a brief description of the components you would add to the study to make it more useful in testing a theory.

What will be an ideal response?

(1) Case studies can suggest a research direction and give hints about theory, but they can't actually tell much about cause and effect. A hypothesis can be derived from a case study and a few case studies can suggest that a more experimental project would be worthwhile. It would be valuable to follow several cases to see if the new drug does in fact reduce their symptoms. (2) In order to actually know something about cause and effect, however, it is necessary to conduct a controlled experiment. For this you would need a larger group of subjects, one-third of whom were given the drug, one-third of whom were given a placebo, and one-third of whom were provided with the current standard treatment. This study would have to follow the rules of science. From this study you could tell something about which condition is more effective in treating this disorder.