I will start by asking myself the question, "If I were to test people in the journalism field on a new medicine that will help them write better, what will the results be?" I can then begin to gather information by taking a list of a hundred and fifty newspapers all across America. Let's say that this is a total amount of employees of 12,650. Then, using a random number table I will select 300 people randomly. The first 300 numbers chosen from number 00001-12650 are the people I will use in the study. We will start off by having each participant write an article about the same topic that will be scored on a common writing rubric that each and every participant will be judged on by an uninvolved third party who will not know who receives what doses if any. However, to ensure the results are completely sound, we will do a double-blind study with the medicine; giving half the participants the actual medicine and the rest a placebo. This will ensure that neither I or the participant will know who is taking the real pill or a sugar one. During this, we will be giving people in the study different doses of the pill to see how it affects their writing skills. The control group is the group in the study that will not be receiving the pill, while the treatments of the other groups will depend upon the dosage they receive. After I get my results, we will replicate the study around 20 to 40 more times to ensure the results are ones that are accurate.
The way we will account for "placebo effect" is that we will bring in the uninvolved third party and will not give them any monetary incentive to help score the exams. We will then compare the actual writing and not the person's physical reactions or feels to the pill to the final writing piece about the same topic as before to see if they score higher than before.
