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Conducting credible and trustworthy research to inform managerial decisions is arguably the primary goal of business and management research. Research design, particularly the various types of experimental designs available, are important building blocks for advancing toward this goal. Key criteria for evaluating research studies are internal validity (the ability to demonstrate causality), statistical conclusion validity (drawing correct conclusions from data), construct validity (the extent to which a study captures the phenomenon of interest), and external validity (the generalizability of results to other contexts). Perhaps most important, internal validity depends on the research design’s ability to establish that the hypothesized cause and outcome are correlated, that variation in them occurs in the correct temporal order, and that alternative explanations of that relationship can be ruled out. Research designs vary greatly, especially in their internal validity. Generally, experiments offer the strongest causal inference, because the causal variables of interest are manipulated by the researchers, and because random assignment makes subjects comparable, such that the sources of variation in the variables of interest can be well identified. Natural experiments can exhibit similar internal validity to the extent that researchers are able to exploit exogenous events creating (quasi-)randomized interventions. When randomization is not available, quasi-experiments aim at approximating experiments by making subjects as comparable as possible based on the best available information. Finally, non-experiments, which are often the only option in business and management research, can still offer useful insights, particularly when changes in the variables of interest can be modeled by adopting longitudinal designs.

What is the general notion of pursuit that correlates to scientific experiments in physics? What are the roles of experiments in physics, the epistemology of experiments, arguments around credibility, and experimental investigations in the 20th and 21st centuries? The experimental enterprise is a complex and interdependent activity wherein experiments yield results where those results form the basis for answers to questions posed by the many uses of the experiment. It is worth examining the significance of exploratory experiments and testing theories, as experimenters often apply several strategies in arguing for the correctness of their results.

Experimental methods have been a hallmark of the scientific enterprise since its inception. Over time, experiments have become much more sophisticated, complex, and nuanced. Experiments have also become much more diverse, and their use within research settings has expanded from the physical sciences to the social sciences, including criminology. Within criminology, experimental methods can manifest in the form of laboratory experiments, field experiments, and quasi-experiments, each of which present their own strengths and weaknesses. Experimental methods can also be applied in the context of between-subject and within-subject paradigms, both of which exhibit unique characteristics and implications. Experimental methods—as a research method—are unique in their ability to help establish causal relationships among variables. This article introduces the topic of experimental methods in criminology, with a specific focus on the subfield of policing.

Public opinion plays a central role in determining the feasibility of efforts to transform energy systems in the coming years, yet scholarship on communication effects and public opinion about clean energy and energy efficiency seems to have expanded only relatively recently. There is a growing body of work that explores how targeted and strategically framed messages affect individuals’ beliefs and motivations to act on matters affecting household energy choices as well as energy policies. One must attend particularly to the principal communication-based factors that shape the public’s understanding of clean energy sources and promote efficiencies in energy use. To better understand the communication vehicles for improving both household energy efficiency and conservation, two research foci are most relevant: (1) field experiments that primarily assess how household energy consumption shifts after receiving energy consumption reports and (2) surveys/laboratory experiments that focus on the nuances of energy-related communications, paying particular attention to the role of politics and ideology. This bimodal classification of clean energy and efficiency communication research genres is not exhaustive but can be synthesized into two major contributions. First, providing households with information about specific benefits that would result from a greater reliance on clean energy may increase support for its development and move individuals toward energy efficiency outcomes; however, exposure to counter-messages that emphasize costs associated with clean energy and the associated policies can negate the effects of pro-clean energy messages. Second, there is still no reprieve from the politicization of energy, and thus the role of partisanship and motivated reasoning must be accounted for when assessing how individuals modify their decision-making processes regarding energy efficiency.

The field of political science is experiencing a new proliferation of experimental work, thanks to a growth in online experiments. Administering traditional experimental methods over the Internet allows for larger and more accessible samples, quick response times, and new methods for treating subjects and measuring outcomes. As we show in this chapter, a rapidly growing proportion of published experiments in political science take advantage of an array of sophisticated online tools. Indeed, during a relatively short period of time, political scientists have already made huge gains in the sophistication of what can be done with just a simple online survey experiment, particularly in realms of inquiry that have traditionally been logistically difficult to study. One such area is the important topic of social interaction. Whereas experimentalists once relied on resource- and labor-intensive face-to-face designs for manipulating social settings, creative online efforts and accessible platforms are making it increasingly easy for political scientists to study the influence of social settings and social interactions on political decision-making. In this chapter, we review the onset of online tools for carrying out experiments and we turn our focus toward cost-effective and user-friendly strategies that online experiments offer to scholars who wish to not only understand political decision-making in isolated settings but also in the company of others. We review existing work and provide guidance on how scholars with even limited resources and technical skills can exploit online settings to better understand how social factors change the way individuals think about politicians, politics, and policies.

Political scientists are increasingly using experiments to study African politics. Experimental methods help scholars to overcome two central research challenges: potential bias in responses to survey questions (social desirability bias), and establishing the effect of X on Y (causality). Regarding survey response bias, experimental methods have been used to study sensitive topics such as ethnic favoritism, clientelism, corruption, and vote buying. In terms of causality, experiments have helped to estimate the effects of programs aimed at enhancing the quality of democracy or public service delivery. Identifying the causes of the political behavior is critical to understanding the “nuts and bolts” of African politics. For policymakers, knowledge of what works to promote democratic accountability ensures the efficient allocation of scarce resources.

Reflexivity, a recursive process of turning back, occurs throughout science. Back-and-forth reflexive processes transpire when the scientist executes self-regard and whenever human science theory incorporates the researcher’s actions. Reflexive processes occur too in the myriad, unavoidable ways that observations of the world depend on scientists’ prior understandings of the world. The multiple forms and complexities of reflexivity pose challenges for all science, yet the challenges are especially pronounced in a science, like psychology, that generates knowledge about human nature. Confronting reflexivity is further impeded by psychology’s markedly scientific (not human scientific) goals to achieve objectivity and value neutrality, and to maintain naturalist assumptions about reality. Yet over the lifespan of scientific psychology some psychologists have faced these challenges and recommended means to acknowledge reflexivity. Their investigations have located, named, and analyzed a set of fallacies associated with disregarding reflexivity. The fallacies include assuming that the psychologist’s conception of cognitive processes are the same as their subject’s; that the psychologist can fully bracket their presuppositions from their observations; that psychological theories need not be relevant to their own scientific thoughts and behaviors; that psychology’s prescribed language for reporting findings accurately describes the phenomenon under investigation; and that psychological knowledge has no consequential effects on the world it predicts and explains. Addressing such fallacies and taking steps to remove them through sustained reflexive awareness is essential to attaining an empirically robust, veridical, and dynamic science. Taken together, the efforts of psychologists who have faced reflexivity and the fallacies related to its denial comprise a productive working template for developing a science that benefits from engaging with reflexive processes instead of disregarding them.

Conflicts are a ubiquitous part of our life. One of the main reasons behind the initiation and escalation of conflict is the identity, or the sense of self, of the engaged parties. It is hence not surprising that there is a consistent area of academic literature that focuses on identity, conflict, and their interaction. This area models conflicts as contests and focuses on the theoretical, experimental, and empirical literature from economics, political science, and psychology. The theoretical literature investigates the behavioral aspects—such as preference and beliefs—to explain the reasons for and the effects of identity on human behavior. The theoretical literature also analyzes issues such as identity-dependent externality, endogenous choice of joining a group, and so on. The applied literature consists of laboratory and field experiments as well as empirical studies from the field. The experimental studies find that the salience of an identity can increase conflict in a field setting. Laboratory experiments show that whereas real identity indeed increases conflict, a mere classification does not do so. It is also observed that priming a majority–minority identity affects the conflict behavior of the majority, but not of the minority. Further investigations explain these results in terms of parochial altruism. The empirical literature in this area focuses on the various measures of identity, identity distribution, and other economic variables on conflict behavior. Religious polarization can explain conflict behavior better than linguistic differences. Moreover, polarization is a more significant determinants of conflict when the winners of the conflict enjoy a public good reward; but fractionalization is a better determinant when the winners enjoy a private good reward. As a whole, this area of literature is still emerging, and the theoretical literature can be extended to various avenues such as sabotage, affirmative action, intra-group conflict, and endogenous group formation. For empirical and experimental research, exploring new conflict resolution mechanisms, endogeneity between identity and conflict, and evaluating biological mechanisms for identity-related conflict will be of interest.

This entry regards intervention research as an essential part of social work as a profession and research discipline. A brief history of intervention research reveals that use of intervention research for the betterment of human conditions is contemporary with the genesis of modern social science. Advances in intervention research are attributed to the comprehensive social programs launched during the 1960s in the United States. A contemporary and generic model of intervention research is described. It is argued that it is ethical to use intervention research and unethical not to use it. Assessment of some of the recent advances in policy making and science gives an optimistic picture of the future of intervention research.

Since the mid-20th century, communication researchers have recognized that audience members selectively expose themselves to information and opinions congenial to their pre-existing views. While this was a controversial idea during the broadcast era of mass media, the expansion of media choice on television and use of information communication technology has brought increased attention to selectivity among audience members. Contemporary scholarship investigates the extent to which people select proattitudinal information or avoid counterattitudinal information and the role these choices play in the effects of media messages on viewers. While selective exposure is a broader phenomenon, this article substantively focuses on the use of politically partisan media, especially the research methods used to investigate media selectivity and its effects. This literature manifests an increased attention to measurement, especially how we measure the core concept of media exposure, novel experimental designs intended to allow investigators to directly view individual choice behavior in complex media environments, and attention to new sources of large-scale data from social media and large text samples. Scholars agree that partisan websites and cable networks provide content politically distinct enough to allow viewers to segregate themselves into liberal and conservative audiences for news but that this kind of polarized viewing is only part of how viewers use media today. A nuanced picture of selectivity shows audiences selecting congenial content but employing broader media use repertoires as well. The mechanisms and effects of media selectivity are psychologically complex and sensitive to contextual factors such as the political issue under consideration.

Religion is a central and comprehensive identity for billions of people all over the world. Politicians and other political actors recognize the vitality of religion and use it for political purposes, deliberately signaling religion, religiosity, or religious values and connecting them to political outcomes or behaviors in an effort to influence the political preferences of religious practitioners. The most efficient way to make the connection between religion and politics is through religious cues. Religious cues create information shortcuts linking religious identity or values with a political candidate or issue. Religious cues are used by political and religious actors in secular and religious contexts and are typically one of two general types: identity cues, which engage an individual’s religious identity and activate an in-group/out-group effect, and linkage cues, which link religious values or beliefs with an issue or candidate. Identity cues are particularly tricky to use in secular contexts because they have been shown to have strong alienating effects on nonreligious people, thereby defeating the intended purpose of the cue sender. For this reason, coded religious language called “implicit cues” is used with greater frequency in political discourse where only the religious cue receiver recognizes the religious cue for what it is. This strategy allows a political candidate to reap the benefits of the cue without risking alienation. While scholars have made substantial progress in using experimental methods to disentangle the ways religious cues influence political behavior, there is ample opportunity for more research exploring different types of religious cues and the way they interact with other forms of cues and identities. Furthermore, most of the research on religious cues has focused on Christian cues in the United States, and a more diverse range of religions and contexts should be explored to understand the way religious cues influence political behavior. Researchers should also expand the definition of “religious practitioners” to explore how religious cues influence the growing number of people who do not affiliate with a religion or engage in practices traditionally associated with religiosity but do identify as religious. This would help to expand conceptualization of political behavior to more accurately reflect lived political experiences. Embracing these opportunities will allow the scholarly community to gain a better understanding of the varied political dynamics of religious cueing, which offers insights into how fundamental identities and attitudes are linked, thereby shedding more light on the complex dynamics of political behavior.

Students of public opinion tend to focus on how exposure to political media, such as news coverage and political advertisements, influences the political choices that people make. However, the expansion of news and entertainment choices on television and via the Internet makes the decisions that people make about what to consume from various media outlets a political choice in its own right. While the current day hyperchoice media landscape opens new avenues of research, it also complicates how we should approach, conduct, and interpret this research. More choices means greater ability to choose media content based on one’s political preferences, exacerbating the severity of selection bias and endogeneity inherent in observational studies. Traditional randomized experiments offer compelling ways to obviate these challenges to making valid causal inferences, but at the cost of minimizing the role that agency plays in how people make media choices. Resent research modifies the traditional experimental design for studying media effects in ways that incorporate agency over media content. These modifications require researchers to consider different trade-offs when choosing among different design features, creating both advantages and disadvantages. Nonetheless, this emerging line of research offers a fresh perspective on how people’s media choices shapes their reaction to media content and political decisions.

This essay explores the contributions of Deleuze and Guattari with a focus on teacher education. Like Deleuze and Guattari, who write about messiness and unpredictability, this essay takes an unconventional approach and is structured rhizomatically, with an emphasis on Deleuze and Guattari’s contributions to modes of thought that problematize, conceptualize and challenge normativity. Problematization and conceptualization create opportunities for experimentation in teacher education, and this article references several research studies that propose different modes of thought. This essay is formulated as a kind of intermezzo, a space of becoming, with the aim of problematizing normativity through different modes of thought and concepts emerging in teacher education.

The vast majority of births in the world occur within marriages or stable partnerships. Yet family planning programs have largely ignored the male partner. One justification for this nearly exclusive focus on women has been that almost all of the modern contraceptive methods are female-oriented. In contrast, studies of fertility preferences within couples that included a later follow-up have shown that men’s fertility preferences are important for predicting subsequent births. Interspousal communication can be key to resolving differences in desired family size and for promoting open contraceptive use. Experimental studies with couples on family planning education and/or counseling show higher contraceptive prevalence or continuation in the couples groups than in the women-only groups, though the differences are not always significant statistically. Other intervention studies have varying designs and mixed results. The purpose of this systematic review is to summarize the research findings on interventions with couples on reproductive health from experimental and pre–post observational studies. An important conclusion is that couples education and counseling are critical components for involving male partners. There is a need for systematic research on couples using a standardized intervention and fixed follow-up times and including analyses of cost-effectiveness.

Causal identification is an important consideration for organizational researchers as they attempt to develop a theoretical understanding of the causes and effects of organizational phenomena. Without valid causal identification, insights regarding organizational phenomena are challenging given their inherent complexity. In other words, organizational research will be limited in its scientific progression. Randomized controlled experiments are often suggested to provide the ideal study design necessary to address potential confounding effects and isolate true causal relationships. Nevertheless, only a few research questions lend themselves to this study design. In particular, the full randomization of subjects in the treatment and control group may not be possible due to the empirical constraints. Within the strategic management area, for example, scholars often use secondary data to examine research questions related to competitive advantage and firm performance. Natural experiments are increasingly recognized as a viable approach to identify causal relationships without true random assignment. Natural experiments leverage external sources of variation to isolate causal effects and avoid potentially confounding influences that often arise in observational data. Natural experiments require two key assumptions—the as-if random assignment assumption and the stable unit treatment value assumption. When these assumptions are met, natural experiments can be an important methodological approach for advancing causal understanding of organizational phenomena.

It can be difficult for political scientists and economists to know when to use laboratory experiments in their research programs. There are longstanding concerns in economics and political science about the external invalidity of laboratory results. Making matters worse, a number of prominent academics recommend using field experiments instead of laboratory experiments to learn about human behavior because field experiments do not have the same external invalidity problems that plague laboratory experiments. The criticisms of laboratory experiments as externally invalid, however, overlook the many advantages of laboratory experiments that derive from their external invalidity. Laboratory experiments are preferable to field experiments at examining hypothetical scenarios (e.g., When automated vehicles dominate the roadways, what principles do people want their automobiles to rely on?), at minimizing erroneous causal inferences (e.g., Did a treatment produce the reaction researchers are studying?), and at replicating and extending previous studies. Rather than being a technique that should be abandoned in favor of field experiments, political scientists and economists should embrace laboratory experiments when testing theoretically important but empirically unusual scenarios, tracing experimental processes, and reproducing and building on prior experiments.

Discrete choice experiments are a popular stated preference tool in health economics and have been used to address policy questions, establish consumer preferences for health and healthcare, and value health states, among other applications. They are particularly useful when revealed preference data are not available. Most commonly in choice experiments respondents are presented with a situation in which a choice must be made and with a a set of possible options. The options are described by a number of attributes, each of which takes a particular level for each option. The set of possible options is called a “choice set,” and a set of choice sets comprises the choice experiment. The attributes and levels are chosen by the analyst to allow modeling of the underlying preferences of respondents. Respondents are assumed to make utility-maximizing decisions, and the goal of the choice experiment is to estimate how the attribute levels affect the utility of the individual. Utility is assumed to have a systematic component (related to the attributes and levels) and a random component (which may relate to unobserved determinants of utility, individual characteristics or random variation in choices), and an assumption must be made about the distribution of the random component. The structure of the set of choice sets, from the universe of possible choice sets represented by the attributes and levels, that is shown to respondents determines which models can be fitted to the observed choice data and how accurately the effect of the attribute levels can be estimated. Important structural issues include the number of options in each choice set and whether or not options in the same choice set have common attribute levels. Two broad approaches to constructing the set of choice sets that make up a DCE exist—theoretical and algorithmic—and no consensus exists about which approach consistently delivers better designs, although simulation studies and in-field comparisons of designs constructed by both approaches exist.