Customer Reviews

Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I want to emphasize something that I think explains the very mixed reviews of this book--that it's NOT an introduction to experimental research. This book is the successor to Campbell and Stanley's Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research and Cook and Campbell's Quasi-Experimentation, both pathbreaking works in this field. It is by far the most sophisticated and thoughtful analysis of the experimental approach to social research, and explores in depth some issues (such as causation) that other books only touch on. Donald Campbell was the major figure in the development of this approach, and this book continues the tradition he began, significantly expanding and revising his arguments. I can understand the frustration of students who are assigned this book in an introductory course, but every researcher who plans on actually doing experimental research in the social sciences (not psychology) needs this book--particularly the last chapter, "A Critical Assessment of Our Assumptions."

I am a doctoral student in public health and recommend this book to my fellow doctoral students out there. It is a thorough and comprehensive text on research methods. I have gone through quite a few texts with similar titles and this stands out as the best.

This book is comprehensive and incredibly useful. Anyone who is interested in designing or interpreting an experiment or a quasi-experiment in the social and behavioral sciences would benefit greatly by reading it.

For a textbook, this is a very easy to read book that provides a complete overview of experimental design options, the rationale for using various methods and the benefits and drawbacks of each. An essential primer for anyone interested in research, evaluation or experimental design.

I had to read this as a 1st year doctoral student. It was awful. My entire cohort agreed. Even one of the 2 co-instructors agreed. We all took a few chapters and created outlines of those chapters for everyone else so that no one person would have to read more than a few. Frankly, if we had not done that, I would not have read the book. If you are a professor considering texts for a research methods course, this is not a good choice. It is intensely boring (I cannot stress this enough) and far too dense to be very practically useful. To add insult to injury, with better editing and much better writing, it could have been 200 pages shorter, too.

This is a great book for those who are willing to discover or improve their knowledge about experimental and quasi-experimental designs - it is an essential book, I'd say. It also helps a lot to understand research and science in general. Really helped me in my dissertation.

I finally got this book yesterday, and it took about 10 days. The book itself is like a new one. Thank you.

but very boring too! Actually, that's not completely true, it's just the first few chapters that are excruciatingly boring, but once you get past all the introductory material, it's quite informative. I'm reading this right now for my graduate course in experimental design, so I most likely found the first few chapters as boring as I did because I already knew the stuff. Although some pictures would be nice, and I'm talking about more than just the illustrations that they use to...uh... "illustrate" different experimental designs, it's nice that there's not a bunch of fluff to sort through looking for the information that is actually important. It's a well written and pretty easy to comprehend must have for those of in the wacky world of experimental studies.

I had read this book in the Univerisity's library and I found that it would help in setting up an evaluational study of educational interventions. I found that it would be a reference book for an educational researcher, hence I bought it.

I am a first year Ph.D. student, and I find this book quite frustrating to read. The reading drags on and on, and I can't really remember what I read. The examples in the book are somewhat helpful, but they do not seem to fully explain the concepts very well. I hope the next edition will have a more comprehensive explanations for the concepts in the book.