Question

Dr. Fletcher is interested in understanding whether joining a fraternity/sorority causes people to become more concerned about their attractiveness and appearance. He recruits a group of 55 freshmen (25 males, 30 females) who are planning to go through fraternity/sorority recruitment on his campus. After they join, he gives them a measure of attractiveness concern/appearance concern (the Body Concern Scale, where higher scores indicate higher body concerns).

Could you explain why Dr. Fletcher is conducting a quasi-experimental design rather than a true experiment?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Dr. Fletcher is conducting a quasi-experimental design rather than a true experiment because he was not able to assign the participants to join a sorority or fraternity. It has been observed that Quasi-experiments does not have any comparison groups neither they use any random assignments. On one hand, in true experiment participants are assigned in a random manner but participants are not assigned randomly to control groups in quasi-experiment.