Story, Dale
2/12/14

EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH DESIGNS

• Examples in business, educational, medical, and sports (steroids, slugging percentage, Ballpark), research.
  • Earthquakes in Azle, Texas. "All the earthquakes had happened after oil and gas companies began fracking and disposing of their fracking fluid in injection wells...It didn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that there might be a connection." Texas Monthly, March 2014.
  • Connecticut Crackdown on Speeding
  • Diabetes Doubles Alzheimer's Risk
  • Italian Prime Minister and Trends in Bond Yields
• Essentials of Experimental Research Designs
• Four components of a research design
• Comparison
• Cross-sectional
• Longitudinal
• Concomitant variation
• Manipulation
• Ex post facto
• Real world
• Internal validity—prove what it claims?  Other factors (confounding variables)?  Rival explanations?  Intervening Factors
• Intrinsic factors—control group
• History
• Maturation
• Pre-test bias
• Extrinsic factors—similarity of groups
• Randomization
• Matching
• External validity
• True Experimental Designs
• “True experiment”
• “Four group design”
• Pre-experimental designs
• One-shot case study
• One-group pretest-post
• Quasi-experimental designs
• “Natural experiment”
• True experiment with matching
• Examples
• Agency study
• Spock revolution
• Organizing the poor
• Tax reform
• Presidential lobbying
• Unfair to control group to receive placebo?