ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on experimental methods for social justice research. It introduces the reader to different types of experiments, their relevance to social justice research, and the various steps involved in designing experiments. Experiments help social justice researchers to test hypotheses, build theories, understand causal mechanisms, and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions. They involve different types of variables such as independent (cause), dependent (effect), control, confounding, mediating, and moderating variables. The chapter delves into the differences between true experiments, quasi experiments, and pre-experiments. True experiments include at least two comparison groups, establish that the independent variable precedes the dependent variable, and use random assignment of participants to groups. Some types of true experiments are factorial experiments, posttest only design, pretest-posttest designs, and Solomon four-group designs. While lab-based experiments allow for careful control of variables, field or natural experiments offer more realism in natural settings. The chapter also provides detailed guidance about best practices and key principles to use for every stage of designing experiments—from recruiting participants, to getting human subjects ethics approval, to the final debriefing step. Finally, the ways to reduce threats to internal validity such as history, maturation, testing, regression to the mean, selection threat, and attrition are discussed.
