Evaluating Design Choice and Threats to Validity in a Quasi-Experimental Design
Evaluating Design Choice and Threats to Validity in a Quasi-Experimental Design
Being a critical researcher requires practice and thought into the reasoning behind various research
design choices. In this Discussion, you will consider a quasi-experimental design used in a study within
your discipline and evaluate it for its appropriateness and any potential flaws it has that may have
impacted the research.
Review the assigned article for your program within the Research Articles document located in the
Learning Resources. Evaluate the choice of the design used in the assigned article. Why was that design
used and not another one? Assess the authors’ performance in explaining this.
What are the types of validity presented and the critical differences among them? Assess the authors’
performance in explaining them.
How would you assess the study’s validity? What information would you need in order to be able to do,
and is that information present in the article?
With these thoughts in mind:
EVALUATING DESIGN CHOICE 2
Post by Day 3 a 3-paragraph evaluation of the choice of design and threats to validity in a quasi-
experimental design. Your response should include an evaluation of the choice of design, the author’s
rationale for the design choice, the types of validity presented and the critical differences among them,
the author’s performance in explaining them, and how you would assess the study’s validity and the
information you would require to do so.
Evaluating Design Choice and Threats to Validity in a Quasi-Experimental Design
This paper seeks to consider a quasi-experimental design used in a study conducted to
educate high school students about HIV and AIDS through art and evaluate it for its
appropriateness and any potential flaws it has that may have impacted the research. The research
for the purposes of this paper was conducted in four New Jersey public schools.
The choice of the design used was evaluated to determine the reasons as to why it was
chosen. Quasi-experimental designs are easier to set up than experimental designs which require
randomization of the sample populations. The use of quasi-experimental designs also minimizes
the threats to external validity. This is because the natural environment does not suffer the same
problems that are usually experienced in controlled environments such as laboratories. The
findings of quasi-experimental designs can also be applied in other settings since they are natural
EVALUATING DESIGN CHOICE 3
experiments. This is because the researcher in this case needs to let manipulations by themselves
without having any control over them (Grosso, 2014)
The validity presented includes both internal and external validity. Internal validity
involves causal effects and causal relationships which occur when the experimenter controls all
variables which would affect the experiment’s results. External validity on the other hand is the
degree to which results obtained from a study can be used to generalize the general sample of
population of interest.
The study’s validity can be assessed by the use of information such as the separation of
individual students from their classes during the program. If separated from their classrooms, the
risk that the program would spill over between participants and nonparticipants would be evident
which would have compromised the external validity reducing the credibility of the research
conducted.
EVALUATING DESIGN CHOICE 4
Reference
Grosso, A. (2014). Educating students about AIDS through art: A quasi-experimental evaluation
in Newark public high schools.
