Week+10+Discussion

Some guidelines to guide our discussion:

For research question #1, how would you measure stress levels? Would you rely on behavioral measures (e.g., self-report stress rating), physiological measures (e.g., blood pressure or salivary cortisol samples) or maybe both? Also, would you be interested in factoring in how long ago the child was diagnosed with ADHD, what particular symptoms of ADHD were most apparent in the child, or whether both parents lived with the child? There are many variables of interest that could be tested or controlled for, depending on what you were interested in here. Research question #2 considers the stress in a sibling of an individual with ADHD. Here, would it matter whether the sibling was older or younger, or the age difference between siblings? How would you define coping strategies? Given that you probably wouldn’t have controlled “pre-“ data (i.e., behavior of the sibling before he or she knew the sibling had ADHD), what are some ways in which you could determine that such coping behaviors are in response to having a sibling with ADHD? Also, would you be interested in stress in siblings who also had ADHD, or would this population be excluded for this particular study? For Research question #3, as a point of clarification, when you say “imaged”, what do you mean? Are you referring to a brain scan? If so, would it be a functional scan (where you observe activation during a specific task) or a structural scan (where you consider morphology, etc of the brain)? Also, I would recommend choosing a specific cognitive disorder as a place to start. If you found interesting results in an initial test, then you might expand to other disorders. I suggest this because there are many factors to control for, and grouping very different populations might make it difficult to observe any effects. Moreover, how could you identify the group (students at high risk for a cognitive disorder) in order to test them one way (in a scanner) vs. another (traditional methods)? Are there sets of tests that you would use? Finally, what are the “significant differences” that you would be interested in comparing in these two groups?