Some notes on the foundations and scope of intensive design

IN THE application of single-case and intensive design to the study of psychopathology and interpersonal processes the primary focus is upon the data of the individual subject as distinct from that of a sample of subjects. Such models begin with the notion that personality processes are stochastic processes. That is, one's moods, affects, signs and symptoms, and interactions with others out of the past or from the present fluctuate over time and with respect to various contingencies in a probability space of a very high order of dimensionality. In practice--that is, in relation to application to a given study or set of studies--we are of course constrained to consider just a very small subspace of this huge hyperspace.