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Quasi-Experimental Designs
Quasi-experimental designs are those that are almost true experimental designs,
except that the participants are not randomly assigned to groups. In quasi-experimental
research, the researcher studies the effect of the treatment on intact groups rather than
being able to randomly assign participants to the experimental or control groups. Borman
et al. (2007) noted that prior studies on the Success for All program used quasi-experimental
designs and therefore were open to numerous threats to internal validity. For example, if
80% of a schools staff had to agree to participate in Success for All, then the schools that
agreed to participate and constituted the experimental group in the quasi-experimental
studies might have had better leaders or more solidarity on the part of the teachers.
Other competing explanations that could not be controlled in quasi-experimental designs
might be the level of funding that a school has (e.g., do schools that agree to use Success
for All have more funding than schools that do not?), or whether schools with greater
challenges seek a program such as Success for All as opposed to schools with students
who achieve above average already? Also, previous studies of Success for All had all been
conducted by developers of the program, which could raise concerns about the effects
of the experimenters as a threat to validity. To minimize this threat, Borman et al. (2007)
enlisted colleagues from other universities to collect the data in their experimental study.
A sample quasi-experimental study evaluating the impact of two delivery systems for
mental health services is displayed in Sample Study 4.1.

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Nonequivalent Control Group Design
The nonequivalent control group design is similar to the static-group comparison
design except for the addition of a pretest. It is depicted as follows:
O X O
..
O O
This design controls for differential selection and mortality somewhat by the use of the
pretest. The researcher would be able to determine if the two groups differed initially on
the dependent variable.
Because Bickman et al. (2000) actually did ask the youth and their parents in their
study to provide data on their mental health functioning before the study started, the
design could be depicted as follows:
O X O
..
O O
with the Os representing the mental health functioning pre- and postmeasures. Thus,
they were able to establish that there was no statistically significant difference on the
Child Behavior Checklist for youth in the treatment and control groups prior to the
intervention.