Class 4

• Research Design is a framework for the collection and analysis of data to answer research questions.
• Fixed designs call for a tight pre-specification at the outset, and are commonly equated with a quantitative approach.
• Flexible designs evolve during data collection and are associated with a qualitative approach, although some quantitative data may be collected.
• Cross-sectional designs involve taking observations at one point in time (no before and after comparisons) and do not include a manipulation of the independent variable (no 'treatment' is given).
• Longitudinal designs examine cases at a particular time (T1), and again at a later time or times (T2, T3, etc.), providing information about the time-order of changes in certain variables.
• Panel studies involve the same people, households, organizations, etc. being studied at different times.
• Cohort studies involve people sharing the same experience being studied at different times, but different people may be studied at each time.
• Experimental design is a research strategy where the researcher strives to isolate and control every relevant condition which determines the events investigated, so as to observe the effects when the conditions are manipulated.
• True experimental designs are common in psychology and organizational studies but rare in sociology or political science, as many variables of interest are not subject to experimental manipulation, and ethical concerns preclude performing experiments.
• Pre-experimental design lacks control, comparison group, pretest, and can only say that something happened during the test, but there is no way to make sure that it would have not happened with the stimulus.
• Case studies have other strengths, providing in-depth descriptions of the characteristics of a particular case that cannot be achieved using other methods.
• Case studies involve an in-depth study of a single case, which can be a person, family, organization, event, etc., and can involve qualitative and/or quantitative research methods.
• Quasi-experiments differ from true experiments in that internal validity is harder to establish, for example, in natural experiments, in which naturally occurring phenomena or changes introduced by people who are not researchers result in experiment-like conditions.
• Correlation design and ex post facto design look for cause-and-effect relationships between two sets of data.
• Types of case studies include critical, extreme (or unique), and revelatory.
• Pre-experimental, true experimental, quasi-experimental, and correlation & ex post facto are different types of experimental designs.
• Revelatory case studies examine a case or context never studied.
• Extreme (or unique) case studies illustrate unusual cases, which help in understanding the more common ones, for example, studying the life of a person who has been married seven times helps researchers understand more common marriage patterns.
• Critical case studies illustrate the conditions under which a certain hypothesis holds or does not hold, for example, studying a person for whom certain counselling techniques are successful.
• The most important characteristic of the experimental approach is that it deals with the phenomenon of 'cause and effect'.