Practice question · Multiple choice
You cannot randomly assign people to a hurricane, yet the health effects of disasters are studied causally. What makes a natural experiment more than an observational study?
Hints
- Ask what randomisation actually provides, then whether a storm's path can supply the same thing.
- Two neighbouring towns, one flooded and one not. What decided which?
Show the answer
D. That something outside the researcher's control assigned exposure
Why
What matters is whether assignment was independent of the outcome, and a storm path can be as indifferent to your health as a coin. It is weaker than a trial, you must argue the exposure really was as-if random, and far stronger than comparing people who chose their circumstances.
Practise Quasi-Experimental and Non-Experimental Designs
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Psychology I is free to start.
More questions on Quasi-Experimental and Non-Experimental Designs
- Ice-cream sales and drowning deaths rise and fall together across the year. Nobody thinks ice cream causes…
- A large and statistically robust correlation is enough to establish which variable causes the other.
- Comparing two regions before and after a policy the researcher did not control is quasi-experimental, not…
- Sort each design by whether it can, on its own, establish causation.
- A quasi-experiment compares crime rates in a city before and after a new law, which the researcher had no…
- You are handed a study reporting that a variable X is associated with an outcome Y, and asked whether X…