Social Experiments

Evaluating Public Programs With Experimental Methods

Written in a friendly, how-to manner, Social Experiments provides a basic understanding of how to design and implement social experiments and how to interpret their results. Through illustrative examples, the author provides a grounding in the experimental method and gives advice on: designs that best address alternative policy questions; maximizing the precision of the estimates; implementing the experiment in the field; data collection; estimating and interpreting program impacts, costs, and benefits; dealing with biases; and the use and misuse of experimental results in the policy process.