Dismantling Research Design

The dismantling design is a type of psychotherapy treatment outcome design that allows researchers to identify which specific elements of a larger treatment package are causative of change. The researcher achieves this aim by randomly assigning some participants to receive all components of the treatment package, whereas other participants receive only some components of the treatment package. The primary methodological advantage of this design is that many factors are held constant across conditions of the experiment. For example, this design controls for threats to internal validity (e.g., maturation, repeated testing, regression to the mean) and amount of time spent in therapy.

If a treatment package consists of Components A and B, a researcher can dismantle this treatment package by randomly assigning participants to receive the full ...