Single-Case Research Methods: Practice-Based Evidence for Evidence-Based Practice

because client heterogeneity is the point, not a nuisance; individual and macro-economic contexts shift constantly; and we need a feasible and ethical research methods appropriate for advice and therapeutic settings

This workshop is designed to equip you with a complete methodological toolkit for conducting single-case research (SCR) in financial planning, therapy, and counseling contexts. By the end of the five weeks, you will be prepared to design, conduct, analyze, and report your own practice-based research and generating credible evidence.

Specifically, you will be able to:

1.     Explain the logic and purpose of applied intervention research, including how single-case methods establish functional relationships between practitioner actions and client outcomes.

2.     Select and apply appropriate SCR designs for your research questions and articulate when each is most suitable.

3.     Define and operationalize variables with precision, translating abstract constructs like "financial well-being" or "therapeutic progress" into measurable, observable indicators.

4.     Implement rigorous measurement procedures, including strategies for repeated measurement across phases while maintaining feasibility in practice settings.

5.     Analyze SCR data using visual inspection and foundational quantitative techniques, interpreting level, trend, variability, and overlap to determine whether a functional relation exists.

6.     Apply established quality standards to evaluate and strengthen your own research, ensuring your findings meet the threshold for credible, publishable evidence.

By the workshop's conclusion, you will have moved from understanding SCR conceptually to being ready to contribute original, practice-based evidence to our fields.

Current students qualify for the student rate $200 with code: StudentSCR200

Single Case Research Methods: Practice-based Evidence for Evidence-based Practice
$500.00
One time

This course equips practitioners to design, implement, and analyze rigorous single-case research capable of identifying causal intervention effects. Through asynchronous modules and live-virtual discussions on design logic, measurement of dependent and independent variables, intervention fidelity, visual and statistical analysis, and research-quality standards, participants learn to generate actionable, ethical evidence that improves client outcomes and bridges the research-to-practice gap.

✓ Accessible, flexible learning format
✓ 11 asychronous learning modules
✓ 5+ live (vitual) discussions
✓ Templates, checklists, and tools you can use immediately

FAQs

  • Professions Recently Adopting Single-Case Research

    Precision/Personalized Medicine: The N-of-1 trial movement has gained significant traction, particularly for chronic conditions where individual response variation is high (pain management, ADHD medication titration, dietary interventions). The push toward personalized medicine has made SCR methodologically attractive.

    Sports Science and Athletic Performance: Coaches and sport psychologists increasingly use SCR to evaluate interventions for individual athletes, recognizing that group averages obscure what works for a specific performer.

    Organizational Behavior Management: Applications in workplace performance, safety behaviors, and leadership coaching—where the "client" is often a single organization or team.

    Health Coaching and Lifestyle Medicine: Particularly for behavior change interventions where individual variability in response is the rule rather than the exception.

    Nursing and Allied Health: Growing adoption in rehabilitation nursing, occupational therapy, and speech-language pathology as well as special education contexts where it is the predominate method.

  • Financial Planning:

    • The field is academically young—doctoral programs and peer-reviewed journals are relatively recent

    • Training emphasizes technical competence (tax law, investment products) over behavioral science methods

    • The dominant research tradition borrowed from finance and economics, which privilege large-sample econometric approaches

    • "Evidence-based financial planning" as a concept is just emerging; the infrastructure for systematic outcome measurement at the individual client level barely exists

    • Practitioners rarely see themselves as researchers or data collectors

      Therapy and Counseling—The Paradox: This is genuinely puzzling because SCR originated in clinical contexts (Skinner, Sidman). The field has the methodological heritage but largely abandoned it in favor of RCT hegemony. Several factors:

      • The "EST movement" (Empirically Supported Treatments) tied credibility to group designs, creating institutional incentives favoring RCTs

      • Training programs emphasize consuming research rather than conducting practice-based research

      • The scientist-practitioner model became more aspirational than operational—practitioners see research as something academics do, not something embedded in clinical work

      • Insurance and regulatory pressures favor standardized protocols validated by group data

  • Within the first week of the workshop, we will survey participants to identify the time(s) that work best for everyone.