political science

indicators (e.g. health status, earnings, school graduation). To blanket suchpost hoc evaluations into the category of SEs widen ...

that they could be adapted to community settings as well. Greenwood provided a theoretical rationale for applying experimental m ...

(Rivlin and Timpane 1975 ), and job search (Wolfhagen 1983 ). Greenberg and Shroder ( 1997 ) provide reports on 143 SEs conducte ...

Table 39.1 Four selected social experiments Exper ment Tested ntervent on Des gn Resu ts D ssem nat on Income ma ntenanceexper m ...

The aim was to encourage them to accept more hard-to-care-for Medicaid patients and to discharge patients to lower-care faciliti ...

and institutional norms, as well as from competing information. ‘‘ScientiWcevi- dence’’ alone will almost never determine the di ...

(See Howell and Peterson 2004 ; Krueger and Zhu 2004 , on rival interpretations of school choice experiments.) On any reasonable ...

Help to Build Consensus The focus and intensity of a social experiment, coupled with a general acceptance among researchers of t ...

in improving the quality of schools are being tested in a number of SEs that give parents choice of their children’s schools (Ho ...

Limitations of SEs ............................................................................................................ ...

Interests are always powerful inXuences on policy. Drug manufacturers, farmers, radio station owners, state and city service wor ...

forward any change based on the results. Results may not even reach the ears of policy makers if the sponsoring agents of the st ...

present a more uniWed front for policy makers trying to understand what researchers believe. Thus, for example, the health insur ...

process. It is an important issue because if people (or organizations) refuse to participate because they know about the no-serv ...

of a full-scale program that would aVect participants’ behavior that do not show up in small-scale experiments. Time The worlds ...

Expense Expense can limit the value that social experiments can provide to policy making. There is generally a direct relationsh ...

Small EVects Social experiments almost never produce slam-dunkWndings. If a proposed inter- vention were so obviously superior, ...

of them has a history. Each has a set of established traditions. Each has a culture that has developed over generations. Each ha ...

same procedures, critics argue that quantitative randomized studies cannot yield sensible results. Similarly, educators often sa ...

modiWcations, and shifts of activity to the private sector. If you were considering investment in large-scale SEs, our advice wo ...