Unique Learning Opportunities
IPR faculty provide uncommon methodological training

Winter, 2008, Volume 30, Number 1

Thomas Cook explains how participants can use design elements in quasi-experimental studies.

Finding a workshop to learn how to make a meringue or throw a ceramic bowl is easy, yet where does one go to learn more about how to eliminate selection bias in a quasi-experiment or use biomarkers to evaluate adolescent stress?

“IPR faculty carry out the Institute’s core mission of conducting relevant and rigorous social policy research, but they also provide a unique opportunity for training in methodology that few other institutes can emulate,” said Fay Lomax Cook, the Institute’s director and professor of human development and social policy.

Quasi-Experimentation Workshops
Much interest abounds in the use of randomized experiments, the “gold standard” for evidence-based studies in educational research, but there are instances where they are not possible to conduct. In such cases, quasi-experiments provide a better research design, noted IPR Faculty Fellow Thomas D. Cook, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in Ethics and Justice.

Cook and his colleague William R. Shadish of the University of California, Merced, held their second series of workshops over the summer.  The three workshops were specifically designed for educational researchers and welcomed more than 90 of them from universities, school districts, and a few research firms. The Spencer Foundation provided funding for the workshops.

The week-long curriculum covered theory and practice for regression-discontinuity designs and interrupted time series among others. Pointing to many examples from education, the two methodologists highlighted the advantages of using such practices, but also discussed the circumstances under which they would not work.

Albert-Enéas Gakusi, a researcher at the African Development Bank in Tunis, Tunisia, said he was very dissatisfied with the applied methods he was using for his program evaluations. After a long and fruitless search for some sort of training session, he eventually chanced upon the IPR quasi-experimentation workshops and into the “good hands” of Cook and Shadish.
“A lot of people talk about evaluating impacts without really knowing what they are talking about, and I didn’t want to be in this case,” Gakusi said.

Quasi-experimentation made him understand that it was possible to conduct robust studies with imperfect information. “The most important lesson I came away with is that it is really very complicated to establish causality,” Gakusi said. “And you have to spend a lot of effort to properly measure effects.” But, he noted, in most cases, this is not done in multilateral and bilateral donors’ evaluations, which have the unfortunate tendency to conclude on a positive note to avoid results that might run contrary to what senior managers or beneficiary governments would want to see.

	Emma Adam demonstrates how to collect saliva samples in the field.

Summer Biomarker Institute
Another area where IPR faculty are pushing the methodological envelope is in implementing biomarkers into large-scale population studies. For the second year, C2S, IPR’s Center on Social Disparities and Health, held its Summer Biomarker Institute, which is supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. In all, more than 30 scholars came for the three-day workshop, including three international participants from Nigeria, China, and the United Kingdom.

Headed by three IPR faculty fellows, developmental psychologist Emma Adam and anthropologists Thomas McDade and Christopher Kuzawa, the program set the stage for two days of hands-on training. An entire session was devoted to conceptual and theoretical issues regarding the integration of biological measures into social science research. They then covered practical topics such as how to collect and analyze saliva, dried blood spots, and DNA and discussed lessons from a recent application of many of these methods, the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project.

The workshop also covered ethical considerations in applying biological measures to community-based research by IPR Faculty Fellow Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law.

Adam is associate professor of human development and social policy. McDade is Weinberg College Board of Visitors Research and Teaching Professor and associate director of C2S. Kuzawa is assistant professor of anthropology.

For more information about upcoming IPR workshops, please see IPR’s Web site, www.northwestern.edu/ipr.