97 There are several contexts in which randomization in research design is not possible. Researchers may be interested in the effects of large-scale events or policy initiatives, or of complex causal processes that cannot be replicated. Threats to external validity in randomized experiments will lead to greater dividends for some research questions in a quasi-experimental design. Quasi-experime...

This paper compares the advantages and disadvantages o f the "pre-planned" and "postplanned" approaches to evaluating program effectiveness. These evaluative approaches are compared along a number o f dimensions which include: (a) Reliability o f data and the cost o f collecting it; (b) Internal validity; (c) External validity; (d) Evaluation obtrusiveness and threat; and (e) Program goal displ...

BACKGROUND Interest in evaluating and improving children's diets in afterschool settings has grown, necessitating the development of feasible yet valid measures for capturing children's intake in such settings. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to test the criterion validity and cost of three unobtrusive visual estimation methods compared with a plate-weighing method: direct onsite obse...

Approaches to scientific knowledge are a bit like rabid sports rivals; often they cannot say anything nice about their own team without simulta­ neously disparaging the other side. At some level, they know these intense rivalries would not exist if the other team were not a worthy contender, but the positive aspects of the other side are seldom acknowledged. likewise, empirical social scientist...

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of “program” in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of Thistlethwaite and Campbell (1960). We organize our discussion of these various research designs by how t...

Social anxiety is an emotional disorder common to various populations around the world. The newly developed Self-Beliefs Related to Social Anxiety Scale (SBSA) aims to assess three kinds of self-beliefs through 15 items that include self-related cognitive factors that evidently result in social anxiety. This study explored the psychometric characteristics of SBSA among 978 Chinese. An eight-ite...

An experiment is a structured model to measure the validity of a hypothesis. There is extensive literature on how to design an experiment, derived by taking a already run experiment as a starting point, and determining what could be done better to get results that are more conclusive. As a result, the concept of an experiment has been treated informally, but if we seek to design an experiment, ...

Internet search has become the most common way that people deal with issues and problems in everyday life. The wide use of Internet search has largely changed the way people search for and store information. There is a growing interest in the impact of Internet search on users' affect, cognition, and behavior. Thus, it is essential to develop a tool to measure the changes in psychological chara...