A Quick Note on Experimental Designs

In many people’s minds, science = experiment. However, an experiment is actually a very specific type of research strategy, and one that, depending on the subject you’re interested in, your may or may not see much of in social research. Psychologists tend to use experiments, for example, but sociologists much more rarely do. Because of the uniqueness of this type of study compared to other quantitative methods, we have a chapter devoted to experiments and their closely-related designs, in which we will discuss causal methods. For this chapter, we will be talking about non-experimental quantitative methods, which are excellent for other types of questions and studies beyond cause and effect.