Single-case design books rarely stay confined to one semester. Their usefulness often grows later, when students have to justify intervention choices, interpret visual data, or defend why one applied design is stronger than another. For ISBN 9780190079970, the buying decision is therefore about time horizon: cheapest short-term access, or a research-methods book worth keeping for practicum, capstone, and graduate work.

If you only need the buying answer

The cheapest route here is 180-day digital access at about $57.99. Quarter rental at $72.86 is the next-lowest short-term option, while the current new print listing is $84.99. That makes this another honest split case: digital wins for one-course cost control, but print is still a strong ownership route because it is only modestly higher than rental and much lower than the sampled new market at $147.05.

Price comparison

Store	Format	Condition	Price	Link
Merybook	Paperback	New	$84.99	Check price
Oxford / eTextbook	Digital	180 days	$57.99	Check digital option
eCampus	Quarter rental	Rental	$72.86	Check rental option
eCampus	Semester rental	Rental	$80.96	Check rental option
eCampus	Paperback	New	$147.05	Check new market

What this price means in practice

This is one of those methods books where digital makes sense if the only question is short-term access. But the print premium over rental is not very large, and the current print price is still much better than the broader clean new-book market. That is exactly the sort of setup where ownership becomes reasonable for students who know the material will come back.

Single-case design is one of the few methods areas where students often revisit both the logic and the graphical reasoning later. For that reason, a marked-up print copy can be more useful than a license that expires.

What this book actually teaches

Single-Case Research Designs: Methods for Clinical and Applied Settings teaches how to think carefully about intervention-based evidence in applied settings. The important value is not only the vocabulary of A-B designs, multiple baselines, reversals, and measurement systems. It is the disciplined way the book teaches readers to connect design choice, graph interpretation, validity, and clinical or educational decision-making.

That is why this title often survives the course that introduces it. Students in special education, counseling, behavior analysis, and applied clinical research tend to meet these questions again when practice and evidence start to collide. A book that already contains your own notes on design logic can remain useful much longer than you expect.

Who should choose digital, and who should buy print

Choose digital if this is a one-course requirement and you are trying to minimize spending now.

Choose print if you expect to use single-case methodology again in practicum, graduate work, thesis planning, or applied intervention research. In that case, the current print listing is a reasonable long-term buy.

Sources checked

Sources checked: Merybook listing search for ISBN 9780190079970, Oxford/eText pricing, and eCampus new and rental pricing. Pricing reviewed April 19, 2026.