All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

During the session on experimental research design, students are expected to learn about the advantages and limitations of experiments in social sciences and experimental ethics. How do I design an experiment? What questions could I answer by setting up an experiment? How do I maximize external and internal validity? Empirical political research addresses these questions (and many more), giving excellent insides into survey and experimental methods.

First things first: experiments, if simplified, can be divided into three categories: laboratory, field, and natural. This typology builds on the extent to which a researcher is involved in the experimental process: the lab offers most for controlling and manipulating, while in a natural setting, the researcher takes the observer’s role. The second important distinction that should be made is between control and treatment groups. The former embodies participants who do not receive a stimulus, which should induce changes in the respondents' behavior. The latter is treated with a stimulus and is compared to the placebo group. Traditionally, groups are assigned randomly to restrict self-selection and other biases that can distort inference.

Experimental research is not capable of answering every single question in PolSci. However, some hypotheses can be reasonably tested with experimental or quasi-experimental designs. So, it is worth asking prospective graduates, who do not have much research experience yet, about their vision and ideas for experimental designs. Thereby we can collect inspiring ideas that might be developed into papers later.

• Ann-Katrin and Anastasia suggested that the more a person listens to country music, the more likely he or she is to fall into stereotypical views of men and women. They proposed a laboratory experiment, which uses visual aids, e.g., videos and pictures that frame interactions between genders, as a treatment for pre-and post-testing of experiment participants. Building inference based on both static and dynamic portrayals of inter-gender interactions would increase the external validity of the laboratory experiment conducted both in static and dynamic settings.

• Dima, Natalja, Rebecca, and Martha came up with an idea of testing their hypothesis that men are more likely to be hired for professional positions than women with a natural experiment. They suggested that assessing the HR’s official behavior would not entirely explain the male dominance in top positions because researchers would then not control for the structural social bias of women being primary caregivers of their families. This bias reduces the amount of available free time for women and, therefore, their motivation and capabilities acquire additional qualifications. However, as the social value system is currently in transition, we will soon become participants of a natural experiment that would flip the hiring chances in favor of women. Would you agree?

• Tilman investigated whether online social networks make political views more extreme with a natural experiment. He suggested that the critical difference between virtual and genuine verbal communication is the premise of anonymity that makes legal prosecution difficult, when not impossible in a partially law-free zone. He proposed that a natural experiment would be appropriate for collecting and evaluating data obtained from chats, forums, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok streams. The quasi-experimental approach could then be reasonably combined with non-random sampling in the form of a snowball strategy, allowing to reach hidden groups.

Find out more by taking a look at my presentation from Fall 2020.