After completing the readings and ruminating over the ideas I keep circling back to one central theme.
How do you truly design a flawless study of human beings?
If one truly takes into account all of the factors that can influence the validity of an experiment (specifically with educational research) I can’t see how it would be possible to proceed. It makes sense, that you can mitigate the effect of these variables with the type of design that you employ but it seems to be the extrinsic validity that would be the most difficult to eliminate. When a researcher conducts an experiment on a specific segment of the population will those results have any applicability to another segment of the population? And isn’t this the basis for developing sound theory? That the results should be replicable by another researcher? Or maybe the underlying insinuation is that the results can only be reproduced in that specific setting.
This topic – understanding experimental research – truly seems to be a convuluted and expanding practice. It led me to question as well, what does it mean to be peer-reviewed? And what do peer-reviewed look for to determine validity? I have skimmed through some other documents to further my background with the subject and have them below anyone had an interest.
PC
Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research
http://www.uky.edu/~clthyn2/PS671/CS_part1.pdf
Understanding and validity in qualitative research
http://www.msuedtechsandbox.com/hybridphd/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/maxwell92.pdf
Criteria for the peer-review process for publication of experimental and quasi-experimental research
http://www.aepc.es/ijchp/articulos_pdf/ijchp-303.pdf
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