Credible sources often disagree on technicalities. Sometimes this includes classification of research design. Some argue that there are only 2 categories of research design:
- True experiments. True experiments have 3 elements: 1) randomization to groups, 2) a control group and an 3) intervention; and
- Non-experiments. Non-experiments may have 1 to none of those 3 elements.
Fundamentally, I agree with the above. But what about designs that include an intervention and a control group, but Not randomization?
Those may be called quasi-experiments; the most often performed quasi-experiment is pre/post testing of a single group. The control group are subjects at baseline and the experimental group are the same subjects after they receive a treatment or intervention. That means the control group is a within-subjects control group (as opposed to between-group control). Quasi-experiments can be used to answer cause-and-effect hypothesis when an experiment may not be feasible or ethical.
One might even argue that a strength of pre/post, quasi-experiments is that we do Not have to Assume that control and experimental groups are equivalent–an assumption we would make about the subjects randomized (randomly assigned) to a control or experimental group. Instead the control and experimental are exactly equivalent because they are the same persons (barring maturation of subjects and similar threats to validity that are also true of experiments).
I think using the term quasi-experiments makes it clear that persons in the study receive an intervention. Adding “pre/post” means that the
researcher is using a single group as their own controls. I prefer to use the term non-experimental to mean a) descriptive studies (ones that just describe the situation) and b) correlation studies (ones without an intervention that look for whether one factor is related to another).
What do you think? 2? or 3?
