Fox's study from 1980 considered writing apprehension and its effect on composition. His research question tried to determine how writing apprehension, writing quality, and length of writing were influenced by two methods of teaching writing. His subjects were 6 classes made of freshmen from the University of Missouri, enrolled in English composition classes. The context of the study falls into the quasi-experiment category, presented in chapter 9. Graduate instructors were used to to teach the groups. The study used quantitative means for analysis. There were 8 hypotheses (p.180) that dealt mainly with when (in the study) students would exhibit the highest levels of writing apprehension, as well as whether the experimental group would write better posttest compositions. To measure the criterion variables, the Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Test and a two hour posttest were used. Fox determined which of his results were statistically significant.
The author points out that Fox did not use the pretests and essay ratings in a repeated measurement analysis of variance, so his non significant results might be questionable. The study seemed to involve too many hypotheses, so I question if the study tried to do too much. I'd also like a definition of writing apprehension for the purposes of the study, though I'm fairly certain that was part of the study (just not included in detail in the book).
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