The Importance of Comparison Groups

I don't know about all of you, but I love analogies. I especially love analogies that are simple and that help point out why something is important. I recently read a very interesting article that helped point out a very crucial aspect of conducting research. And you might be saying to yourself, “Why on earth is she talking about research methods? Isn’t this blog supposed to be about families?” Well don’t you worry, I will get to that as well! But let's first start off with a simple analogy.

Imagine you walk into your laundry room and there is a huge mound of laundry just waiting for you to do-some of you probably do not have to use too much of your imagination in order to picture this, me included. Anyways, you courageously start into this heaping pile of clothes, only to realize that about 80 percent of the clothes are covered in mud. You roll your sleeves up and try to scrub the mud out. Unfortunately, and much to your frustration, you realize that you will need to get some intense stain remover spray if you want to make any progress. You load up your five little kiddos into your minivan and drive to the store, blasting that Disney music the whole way. When you get to the store you rush to the cleaning and laundry isle. But you know the drill, the kids are much more interested in the candy isle. They are tugging on your shirt, trying to convince you to buy them some. They even try the persuasion tactic of promising to share their candy with you. Their pleading and tugging make it difficult to read about the two different stain removers that are available. You are torn on which one will get the job done. Finally, their persistent tugging gets to you. You end up quickly grabbing the cheapest stain remover and rush to the candy isle. Back at home you put the spray to the test. It does the job for the most part but there is still some mud stains on a portion of the clothes. At this point you wish you had just bought both of the sprays so that you could compare the effects of them. Even though experimenting with both sprays might have been more expensive and maybe time consuming, it would have been helpful to know which one works better. You make a note to yourself that next time you will try both kinds and therefore, better be able to compare the results and effects.

This analogy demonstrates the importance of comparison groups. When doing a research experiment, it is important to have two at least two groups you are comparing against. Just like in the analogy, the mom would have liked to know which spray got the mud stains out the best. But since she only got one spray she only new the results that that single spray would brings. Whether the other spray would have done a better job remains a mystery. She had no comparison group with in her real life experiment. This is the same with other experiments, a comparison group is important.

I recently read about an experiment that happened a few years ago. They wanted to know if children being raised in a gay or lesbian marriage was negatively effected in comparison to children being raised within a heterosexual household. I find this a very interesting topic. However, when doing experiments to test this theory, the researchers did not do a good job of including comparison groups. In this I mean, they got feedback from the gay and lesbian marriages but they did not get do very many tests to get feedback from heterosexual households. So going back to our analogy, they essentially only experiment with one spray of stain remover and not the other.

So, why is it important to have comparison groups when doing research experiments that deal with family issues?

Studying behaviors within a family is difficult to measure and get clear evidence. Therefore, it is extremely important to have comparison groups during those experiments. You need to be able to compare your results to better understand the effects that those things have on a family. So here is a little tip for you: next time you are trying to figure out what things have a big impact on your family, make sure you look to see if the experiment has comparison groups.