Week 5 Assignment: Discuss Quasi-Experimental Designs

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Week 5 Assignment: Discuss Quasi-Experimental Designs 

Part I – Answer the following questions:

  1. Jackson (2012), even-numbered chapter exercises, p 360.
  2. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of      quasi-experiments? What is the fundamental weakness of a quasi-experimental      design? Why is it a weakness? Does its weakness always matter?
  3. If you randomly assign participants to groups, can you      assume the groups are equivalent at the beginning of the study? At the      end? Why or why not? If you cannot assume equivalence at either end, what      can you do? Please explain.
  4. Explain and give examples of how the particular      outcomes of a study can suggest if a particular threat is likely to have      been present.
  5. Describe each of the following types of designs,      explain its logic, and why the design does or does not address the      selection threats discussed in Chapter 7 of Trochim and Donnelly (2006):
    1. Non-equivalent control group pretest only
    2. Non-equivalent control group pretest/posttest
    3. Cross-sectional
    4. Regression-Discontinuity
  6. Why are quasi-experimental designs used more often than      experimental designs?
  7. One conclusion you might reach (hint) after completing      the readings for this assignment is that there are no bad designs, only      bad design choices (and implementations). State a research question for      which a single-group post-test only design can yield relatively      unambiguous findings.

Part II – Answer the following questions:

  1. What research question(s) does the study address?
  2. What is Goldberg’s rationale for the study? Was the      study designed to contribute to theory? Do the results of the study      contribute to theory? For both questions: If so, how? If not, why not?
  3. What constructs does the study address? How are they      operationalized?
  4. What are the independent and dependent variables in the      study?
  5. Name the type of design the researchers used.
  6. What internal and external validity threats did the      researchers address in their design? How did they address them? Are there      threats they did not address? If so how does the failure to address the      threats affect the researchers’ interpretations of their findings? Are      Goldberg’s conclusions convincing? Why or why not?

Support your paper with a minimum of 5 resources. In addition to these specified resources, other appropriate scholarly resources, including older articles, may be included.
Length: 5-7 pages not including title and reference pages
References: Minimum of 5 scholarly resources.