40 Key Takeaways and Exercises

Key Takeaways

• Quasi-experimental research involves the manipulation of an independent variable without the random assignment of participants to conditions or counterbalancing of orders of conditions.
• There are three types of quasi-experimental designs that are within-subjects in nature. These are the one-group posttest only design, the one-group pretest-posttest design, and the interrupted time-series design.
• There are five types of quasi-experimental designs that are between-subjects in nature. These are the posttest only design with nonequivalent groups, the pretest-posttest design with nonequivalent groups, the interrupted time-series design with nonequivalent groups, the pretest-posttest design with switching replication, and the switching replication with treatment removal design.
• Quasi-experimental research eliminates the directionality problem because it involves the manipulation of the independent variable. However, it does not eliminate the problem of confounding variables, because it does not involve random assignment to conditions or counterbalancing. For these reasons, quasi-experimental research is generally higher in internal validity than non-experimental studies but lower than true experiments.
• Of all of the quasi-experimental designs, those that include a switching replication are highest in internal validity.