This assignment presents an analysis of various intervention research techniques. Since randomized controlled trials are considered the gold standard for testing the efficiency and effectiveness of interventions, this assignment will primarily focus on the value of other types of intervention research techniques. For convenience, most examples in this assignment will focus on schizophrenia interventions. Schizophrenia is a disorder characterized by disturbances in thought content, perception, affect, self-perception, motivation, and behavior. This dysfunction causes profound disruptions in the lives of individuals. There is therefore a huge need to develop effective interventions for people with schizophrenia (Halgin and Whitbourne, 2010). The first part of the assignment will consist of a brief description of randomized controlled trials and their advantages and disadvantages. The following section will present a critical analysis of various other intervention research techniques which include various group approaches and ideographic approaches to intervention research. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are a quantitative experimental design that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention. In an RCT, participants are randomly assigned to receive either one of the interventions or the placebo, and the groups are compared on various outcome measures to verify the effectiveness of the intervention (Stolberg, Norman & Trop, 2004 ). The RCT is the only known research design that uses random assignment of participants to omit any systematic differences between groups other than the independent variable, thereby overcoming selection bias (Lovelock, Mathews, Murphy, 2010). Another...... middle of paper ...... longitudinal study of the ear. Archives of General Psychiatry, 57(11), 1053-1058. Roberts, M. and Ilardi, S. (2003). Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology (1st ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Rosenbaum, R., Kohler, S., Schacter, D., Moscovitch, M., Westmacott, R. and Black, S. et al. (2005). The Case of KC: Contributions of a Memory Impaired Person to Memory Theory, 43(7), 989--1021.Shapiro, S., & Rosenberg, L. (1998). Bias in case-control studies. (1999). Overview of research and data in psychology (1st ed.). London: Routledge, J. and Chung, K. (2010). Observational Studies: Cohort and Case-Control Studies, 126(6), 2234. Stolberg, H., Norman, G., and Trop, I. (2004). Randomized controlled trials., 183(6), 1539--1544.