A Publicat al Center for the Dissemination of Disability Research ( NCDDR ) The Role of Single-Subject Experimental Designs in Evidence-Based Practice Times

The concept of evidence-based practice (EBP) is omnipresent in medicine and allied health care and is gradually gaining a foothold in rehabilitation and disability as well (NCDDR, 2006). EBP is defined as the integration of best and current research evidence and clinical/educational expertise with relevant stakeholder perspectives to inform decisions relative to an individual client (Schlosser & Raghavendra, 2004). The emergence of EBP has brought about increased scrutiny of the importance of evidence and what constitutes highquality research evidence. One outgrowth of this emphasis has been the declaration of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), where a sample is drawn from the population and participants are randomly allocated to the treatment group or the control group (Hahs-Vaughn & Nye, 2008), as the gold standard of treatment research (only to be superceded by meta-analyses of more than one RCT) (Sackett et al., 1997).

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