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What are "Research Events?"
A research event is anything that is programmed to happen during a study. There are three major kinds of events.
Treatment Events
A Treatment Event, sometimes called an "intervention" or sometimes in performance research called a "stimulus," is an action taken to manipulate something in an experiment to study its effects on a dependent variable. For example, you might be interested in studying the effects of drinking coffee on reading performance. Treatment events are the pillars of classical experimental designs, but they also can be embedded in surveys and questionnaires to study problems of measurement.
Measurement Events
These are actions taken to learn about the attitudes, beliefs, personal attributes, and behavior of the populations under study. In a survey, measurement events are usually questions, but in experiments, they can be anything from blood pressure readings to camera images to responses to stimuli on visual displays.
Support Events
These are strategically placed actions that make ready, facilitate, guide, or otherwise manage a study. Simple screens that instruct the subject or experimenter are typical support events.
Null Events
A Null Event is a place holder where nothing happens (deliberately, this is). The purpose of inserting null events is to fill the time intervals in which other groups are presenting measurements or treatments. This aligns the events in one group with events in another, thereby controlling for the effects of history.