ABSTRACT
In the previous topic, you learned how cause-and-effect relationships might be examined by conducting an experiment. Sometimes, we are interested in identifying a cause after the effect or outcome has already been observed. For instance, we might observe that a large number of students dropped out of a local high school last year. Note that dropping out is an outcome or dependent variable . Research might be conducted to try to establish the cause (the independent variable). This would require causal-comparative research in which we look for the cause of some observation by looking to the past and comparing groups.
