Within-Subject Research Designs for Dance Medicine and Science

Dance medicine and science is an applied research endeavor with a particular interest in attempting to effect clinically significant improvements in the performance of exceptional individuals. Unfortunately, the group comparison research designs currently popular with dance medicine and science researchers do not meet all of the needs of an applied science. We would like to propose within-subject research designs as useful alternatives for researching questions important to dance medicine. Within-subject designs have variously been called single-subject designs, singlecase designs, individual subject designs, ideographic studies, and small N studies. We have selected the term within-subject to draw attention to the major defining characteristic of these designs — each subject’s performance is compared with his or her own performance under varying experimental conditions. We will describe three basic withinsubject designs, their advantages, and their limitations. We will also explain several misconceptions about withinsubject designs and then conclude with several suggestions for how researchers might use within-subject designs to achieve sensitive and convincing analyses of phenomena important to dance medicine and science.