Source: Laboratories of Gary Lewandowski, Dave Strohmetz, and Natalie Ciarocco—Monmouth University

A within-subjects, or repeated-measures, design is an experimental design where all the participants receive every level of the treatment, i.e., every independent variable. For example, in a candy taste test, the researcher would want every participant to taste and rate each type of candy.

This video demonstrates a within-subjects experiment (i.e., one where there is an independent variable with several variations or levels) that examines how different motivational messages (e.g., hard work, self-affirmation, outcomes, and positive affect) influence willingness to exert physical effort. As a within-subjects design, the participant will read each of the four types of motivational messages and then lift weights to measure physical effort. By providing an overview of how a researcher conducts a repeated-measures experiment, this video allows viewers to see how to address order effects through counterbalancing, which involves a systematic approach to making sure all possible orders of the conditions occur in the study.

Psychological studies often use higher sample sizes than studies in other sciences. A large number of participants helps to ensure that the population under study is better represented and the margin of error accompanied by studying human behavior is sufficiently addressed. In this video, we demonstrate this experiment using just one participant. However, as represented in the results, we used a total of 72 participants to reach the experiment’s conclusions.