Quasi-experimental designs are often used when conducting program evaluations on non-profit organizations. Examples of such organizations are police stations, fire departments, emergency rooms, and community health clinics. It is not possible to randomly assign people to go to a specific emergency room or community health clinic as this is dependent on where someone is when an emergency occurs or where someone lives- which cannot be randomly assigned. As such, a true experiment is not possible. Quasi-experiments allow researchers to collect data without random assignment. Information gained from quasi-experiments as part of program evaluation can help to improve patient care, cost-efficiency, patient satisfaction, timeliness of services, job satisfaction, and so on.
Pretend you have a grant to create a quasi-experiment to do a program evaluation on a non-profit.
- What non-profit(s) would you focus on? Why?
- What would be your research question?
- What data would you gather? Why?
- Would you want to use an employee or external consultant to collect the data? Why?
- What are possible limitations to this study?
APA format is not required
300 – 350 words needed