Week5 Assignment Quasi-Experimental Designs

Week5 Assignment Quasi-Experimental Designs

Week5 Assignment Quasi-Experimental Designs

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Week 5 Assignment: Discuss Quasi-Experimental Designs

Part I – Answer the following questions:

Jackson (2012), even-numbered chapter exercises, p 360.
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?
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.
Explain and give examples of how the particular      outcomes of a study can suggest if a particular threat is likely to have      been present.
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):Non-equivalent control group pretest only
Non-equivalent control group pretest/posttest
Cross-sectional
Regression-Discontinuity
Why are quasi-experimental designs used more often than      experimental designs?
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:

What research question(s) does the study address?
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?
What constructs does the study address? How are they      operationalized?
What are the independent and dependent variables in the      study?
Name the type of design the researchers used.
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.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

• The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.