POLI 30 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Random Assignment, Confounding, Internal Validity
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The difference between what happened to you when you got the treatment and what would happen if you didn"t get the treatment. You don"t get to absorb both outcomes. Can"t rule out causality without these criteria. Are correlated with one of the independent variables. We"d like to assess whether there is a causal relationship between x and y. This can be hard: temporal ordering, correlation, causal mechanism, and. Without time, machines, we can"t prove that x caused y but we can still do our. When we look at each research design, we will examine their strengths and confounding variables best weaknesses, especially comparing: Can we say, our study, some iv caused the dv? . There is usually a trade-off between these two. Experiment because you control the independent variable. Randomized because people are randomly assigned to either treatment or control. Controlled: independent variable gets the treatment and control group does not get treatment or gets placebo.
