Designing Designs for Research. Campbell, D.T. And Stanley, J.C. (1963, 1966). Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research. Rand McNally. Such as Campbell and Stanley (1963). Towards a Guide for Novice Researchers on Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Studies. My Brother Tom 2001 on this page. Tional interference. Table 1: Campbell & Stanley’s (1963) Threats to Internal Validity. Events, other than the experimental treatments, influence results.

The intent of this volume is to update, perhaps even to alter, our thinking about quasi-experimentation in applied social research and program evaluation. Since Campbell and Stanley (1963) introduced the term quasi-experiment, we have tended to see this area as involving primarily two interrelated topics: the theory of the validity of casual inferences and a taxonomy of the research designs that enable us to examine causal hypotheses. We can see this in the leading expositions of quasi-experimentation (Campbell and Stanley, 1963, 1966; Cook and Campbell, 1979) as well as in the standard textbook presentations of the topic (Kidder and Judd, 1986; Rossi and Freeman, 1985), where it is typical to have separate sections or chapters that discuss validity issues first and then proceed to distinguishable quasi-experimental designs (for example, the pretest-posttest nonequivalent group design, the regression-discontinuity design, the interrupted time series design). My first inclination in editing this volume was to emulate this tradition, beginning the volume with a chapter on validity and following it with a chapter for each of the major quasi-experimental designs that raised the relevant conceptual and analytical issues and discussed recent advances. But, I think, such an approach would have simply contributed to a persistent confusion about the nature of quasi-experimentation and its role in research. Instead, this volume makes the case that we have moved beyond the traditional thinking on quasi-experiments as a collection of specific designs and threats to validity toward a more integrated, synthetic view of quasi-experimentation as part of a general logical and epistemological framework for research. To support this view that the notion of quasi-experimentation is evolving toward increasing integration, I will discuss a number of themes that seem to characterize our current thinking and that cut across validity typologies and design taxonomies.