0F Experiments

Raymond Duch, Nuffield College Oxford
9 - 20 July (two week course / 35 hrs)

Detailed Course Outline [PDF]

THIS COURSE IS NOW FULLY BOOKED AND WE ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS

Course Content

The Experimental Summer School will be held at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) at Nuffield College Oxford.  CESS has a fully-equipped experimental lab which will be an integral part of the Summer School instruction (http://cess-wb.nuff.ox.ac.uk/).  All course lectures and lab sessions will be held at the Nuffield College CESS.  

The course will be taught by a number of prominent scholars in the field of experimental social science. 

The course is designed to cover all of the major research design, programming, implementation, and data analysis issues that are associated with conducting social science experiments. 
Students will learn what research questions can be addressed using experiments and we will cover the full range of experimental methods: field, lab, on-line and neuro. 
And the course will provide instruction for the full range of issues that researchers deal with when they conduct a social science experiment: the ability to draw causal inferences; the actual design of an experiment; programming an experiment in the lab; preparing data; and techniques for analyzing data.

Course Objectives

The objectives of the course are to provide researchers with all of the design, implementation, and analytic tools necessary for conducting an experimental research project.  The course instructors all have extensive experience in designing and implementing field, lab, on-line and neuro experiments.  In addition, the course will take place at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) which is a new facility and has a state-of-the-art lab facility; the neuro-experimental component of the course will have access to the Oxford’s extensive neuro-imaging equipment and facilities.  The objective is to provide students with all of the theoretical foundations for designing, conducting and analyzing experiments but also to learn all of the implied applied aspects of implementing an experiment.  For example, students will have an opportunity to implement a lab experiment including designing, programming the experiments in Z-Tree, working with the subject recruitment software, recruiting subjects, conducting the experiment with actual subjects, and analyzing the data.

 This course is appropriate for students, from any discipline, who expect to include experimental research as part of their research agenda.  It is also appropriate for students who want to become informed consumers of experimental research scholarship.

Course Prerequisites

Students should have a basic background in research design and basic statistics.  For example, with respect to research design, they should understand such basic concepts such as exogeneity, control group, and confounding effects.  And with respect to basic statistics they should understand the principals of ordinary least squares regression; how to calculate simple measures of association; and have some familiarity with a statistical software package.

Backround Reading:

General overview of experimental method:

Morton, Rebecca and Ken Williams. 2010.
From Nature to the Lab: The Methodology of Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality.
Cambridge University Press.

Example of field experiment article:

Gerber, Alan S., Donald P. Green, and Roni Shachar. 2003.
Voting may be habit forming: Evidence from a randomized field experiment. American Journal of Political Science 47 (3): 540-50.

Example of lab experiment article:

Levine, David and Thomas Palfrey. 2005.
A Laboratory Test of the Rational Choice Theory of Voter Turnout. American Political Science Review 101(1, February):143-158.

Example of virtual on-line experiment article:

Tomz, Michael and Robert P. Van Houweling. 2009.
The Electoral Implications of Candidate Ambiguity." American Political Science Review 103:83-98.