Description:
Puppy therapy is a form of animal-assisted therapy, in which puppy contact is introduced into the therapeutic process. Puppy rooms have been set up to de-stress students and staff at my own university (Sussex) in the UK along with universities in Bristol, Nottingham, Aberdeen and Lancaster. I've heard of similar things at Dalhousie and Simon Fraser in Canada and Tufts and Caldwell in the USA. My own contribution is to sometimes bring my adorable spaniel, Ramsey, into work to sit in my office and look cute at any students who break down in tears about some stats issue they have. Despite this increase in puppies on campuses (which can only be a good thing) to reduce stress, the evidence base is pretty mixed. A review of animal-assisted therapy in childhood mental health found that of 24 studies, 8 found positive effects of animal-assisted therapy, 10 showed mixed findings, and 6 concluded that there was no effect (Hoagwood, Acri, Morrissey, & Peth-Pierce, 2017). Imagine we wanted to contribute to this literature by running a study in which we randomized people in three groups: (1) a control group (this could be a treatment as usual, a no treatment or ideally some kind of placebo group – for example, if our hypothesis was specifically about puppies we could give people in this group a cat disguised as a dog); (2) 15 minutes of puppy therapy (a low-dose group); and (3) 30 minutes of puppy contact (a high-dose group). The dependent variable was a measure of happiness ranging from 0 (as unhappy as I can possibly imagine being) to 10 (as happy as I can possibly imagine being). The design of this study mimics a very simple randomized controlled trial (as used in pharmacological, medical and psychological intervention trials) because people are randomized into a control group or groups containing the active intervention (in this case puppies, but in other cases a drug or a surgical procedure). We'd predict that any form of puppy therapy should be better than the control (i.e. higher happiness scores) but also formulate a dose-response hypothesis that as exposure time increases (from 0 minutes to 15 and 30) happiness will increase too. The effects of the dosage of puppy therapy are coded as dummy variables: Dummy1 is set to 1 if participants received the intervention with 15 min duration, Dummy2 is set to 1 received the intervention with 30 min duration.

Variables:

• Person: Participant ID
• Dose: Amount of time spent with the puppy (Control = no time; 15 mins; 30 mins)
• Happiness: Happiness rating (0: as unhappy as I can possibly imagine being to 10: as happy as I can possibly imagine being)
• Dummy1: Dummy variable coding whether the participant received 15 min of puppy therapy (1; otherwise: 0).
• Dummy2: Dummy variable coding whether the participant received 30 min of puppy therapy (1; otherwise: 0).

Reference:
Field, A. P. (2017). Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics (5th ed.). Sage. [Fictional data set]
Hoagwood, K. E., Acri, M., Morrissey, M., & Peth-Pierce, R. (2017). Animal-assisted therapies for youth with or at risk for mental health problems: A systematic review. Applied Developmental Science, 21(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2015.1134267 [Source of inspiration]
The data set was constructed by Andy Field who therefore owns the copyright. Andy Field generously agreed that we can include the data set in the jamovi data library. This data set is also publicly available on the website that accompanies Andy Field`s book, https://edge.sagepub.com/field5e. Without Andy Field`s explicit consent, this data set may not be distributed for commercial purposes, this data set may not be edited, and this data set may not be presented without acknowledging its source (i.e., the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND license).