Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences

Randomized experiments are generally accepted as providing the strongest evidence about cause and effect and are often called the gold standard of research design methods. There has been a wide adoption of experimental methods in agriculture, medicine, industrial design, and laboratory social sciences, such as experimental psychology, where conditions can be controlled. Since then, there has been an increase in the use of field experiments to provide evidence of cause and effect beyond the laboratory. However, the social settings in which these studies take place complicate the design and evaluation of experiments because their social contexts must be taken into account in order for the experiment to provide useful and unambiguous results. In Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences, statistician Larry V. Hedges details how to design educational and social science field experiments that are sensitive enough to provide clear-cut evidence on the effects of social interventions.

• Draws on one hundred years of statistical theory and experimental design and links it with contemporary statistical methods in the social sciences
• Covers four basic research designs--and 39 elaborations of those designs--that are used the most in social experimentation while also providing an introduction to additional, more complex, designs
• Discusses the practical problems of how to recruit and maintain a sample throughout the duration of an experiment
• Brings together work on experimental design, design sensitivity, and optimal design of experiments for the most frequently used research designs in education and the social sciences
• Highlights the social-structural information--also referred to as design parameters--that are necessary to understand how to design adequately sensitive experiments
• An essential resource for researchers planning educational and social field experiments and graduate students