What are quasi-experimental designs? Why are they important?

PSYCH 540 Week 4 Complete Discussion 1.To illustrate this, how about going to the library in one of the psychological databases (e.g. Proquest, PsycINFO, etc.) or going to Google Scholar and finding an article that reports on either a case study or a small-n experimental design study? Discussion 2.Design an imaginary quasi-experimental study. Give us a brief description of your study, then answer as many of the following questions as you care to: 1. What is the hypothesis of your imaginary study? 2. What is/are the independent variable(s)? 3. What is/are the dependent variable(s)? 4. Briefly, how will you test your hypothesis? That is, what are the procedures you will use in your study? 5. What led you to your hypothesis; that is, what makes you think that changing the independent variable(s) will cause a change in the dependent variable(s)? 6. Now comes the fun question: Why could this study not be conducted with a true-experimental design? Learning Team Assignment – Research Project: Experimental Method Design Utilizing experimental research methods, design a research study for the issue that you selected for your Research Projects and write a research article reporting on your study as if you had actually conducted it. • Your paper, citations, and reference list need to be formatted properly in APA format. • (NOTE: THIS ASSIGNMENT MUST USE EXPERIMENTAL METHODS.) As a part of your research study be sure to address the following items: • a. State the experimental hypothesis that your study tested. • b. Describe your sample population in detail (selection method, size, composition, any incentives offered, etc.). • c. Describe the experimental method(s) that you selected to utilize in your research study and explain why you selected these methods. Describe fully your methods, procedures, variables, and instruments used to measure changes in the variables. • d. Describe your data analysis methods, including the inferential statistics you used. • e. Describe the results of the experiment (these are imaginary results you will come up with based on the methods and data analysis). As with last week’s project, there is no word count for this assignment. It will be graded based on comprehensiveness and thoroughness in creating a scholarly/professional report of your descriptive methodology study you created within your group imagination AND the coherence and cohesiveness of all the elements in the study (meaning, it all fits together as one study). Use APA format for structure of the paper, citations, and reference list. Click the Assignment Files tab to submit your assignment. Individual Assignment – Applied Research Questions Using the University Library, the text, AND other resources (making sure they are all scholarly sources!) and citing these sources in your paper, answer the following questions. Your response to each bullet point group of questions should be at least 400 words in length. Use proper APA format in writing your paper, though an introduction and conclusion are not required. • What are descriptive statistics and what are inferential statistics? What are the similarities between descriptive and inferential statistics? What are the differences? • What are the similarities between descriptive single-case designs (which are qualitative studies, like case studies are) and small-N research designs? What are the differences? When should descriptive single-case designs be used and when should small-N research designs be used? • What are true experiments? How are threats to internal validity controlled by true experiments? • What are quasi-experimental designs? Why are they important? How are they different from experimental designs? Click the Assignment Files tab to submit your assignment.