Within- vs Between-Subjects Designs

Info sheet · Statistics for Psychology & Neuroscience

Author

Andrew Bell

Published

August 13, 2026

Info sheet 0.1 (skeleton) · Prerequisites: experiments vs observation · Give feedback ↗

Working notes for the author — not shown to students once collapsed; remove before publishing.

What you’ll get from this sheet

By the end you should be able to:

  1. Tell a within-subjects design from a between-subjects one.
  2. Say why within-subjects designs are more powerful but carry order effects.

Between-subjects: each participant sees one condition. Within-subjects: each sees all — more powerful (each person is their own baseline) but exposed to order/carryover effects, which is why we counterbalance.

[Main idea]

TODO — write the core explanation in transcript voice.

[Interactive demo]

TODO — native <input> + string-built SVG / OJS widget (see any built sheet for the pattern).

See it in code

# TODO
# TODO

TODO — a short question.

TODO — the worked answer.

TODO — a common mistake and how to avoid it.

Where this shows up next

TODO — link to the relevant book chapter.