Social Experiments

Abstract

Recent concern about social experimentation, program evaluation, impact analysis and related activities can be viewed as a broad social movement. An older tradition of evaluation and social experimentation in medicine that arose from a research and development perspective contrasts with the new, policy-oriented movement toward evaluation research. The independent variables or interventions in policy-oriented studies range from medical treatments to bureaucratic arrangements for service delivery. The boundaries between social experimentation and other forms of applied social research are indefinite. The characteristics, advantages and limitations, and examples of various forms of human experiments are discussed, including small and large scale controlled field trials for health care facilities and medical treatments and policies, and quasi-experiments which attempt to approximate randomized controlled experiments without the use of randomization to establish experimental and control groups.