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• Quasi-Experimental Design | Definition, Types & Examples

Quasi-Experimental Design | Definition, Types & Examples

Published on July 31, 2020 by Lauren Thomas . Revised on January 22, 2024.

Like a true experiment , a quasi-experimental design aims to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between an independent and dependent variable .

However, unlike a true experiment, a quasi-experiment does not rely on random assignment . Instead, subjects are assigned to groups based on non-random criteria.

Quasi-experimental design is a useful tool in situations where true experiments cannot be used for ethical or practical reasons.

Table of contents

Differences between quasi-experiments and true experiments, types of quasi-experimental designs, when to use quasi-experimental design, advantages and disadvantages, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about quasi-experimental designs.

There are several common differences between true and quasi-experimental designs.

Example of a true experiment vs a quasi-experiment

However, for ethical reasons, the directors of the mental health clinic may not give you permission to randomly assign their patients to treatments. In this case, you cannot run a true experiment.

Instead, you can use a quasi-experimental design.

You can use these pre-existing groups to study the symptom progression of the patients treated with the new therapy versus those receiving the standard course of treatment.

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Many types of quasi-experimental designs exist. Here we explain three of the most common types: nonequivalent groups design, regression discontinuity, and natural experiments.

Nonequivalent groups design

In nonequivalent group design, the researcher chooses existing groups that appear similar, but where only one of the groups experiences the treatment.

In a true experiment with random assignment , the control and treatment groups are considered equivalent in every way other than the treatment. But in a quasi-experiment where the groups are not random, they may differ in other ways—they are nonequivalent groups .

When using this kind of design, researchers try to account for any confounding variables by controlling for them in their analysis or by choosing groups that are as similar as possible.

This is the most common type of quasi-experimental design.

Regression discontinuity

Many potential treatments that researchers wish to study are designed around an essentially arbitrary cutoff, where those above the threshold receive the treatment and those below it do not.

Near this threshold, the differences between the two groups are often so minimal as to be nearly nonexistent. Therefore, researchers can use individuals just below the threshold as a control group and those just above as a treatment group.

However, since the exact cutoff score is arbitrary, the students near the threshold—those who just barely pass the exam and those who fail by a very small margin—tend to be very similar, with the small differences in their scores mostly due to random chance. You can therefore conclude that any outcome differences must come from the school they attended.

Natural experiments

In both laboratory and field experiments, researchers normally control which group the subjects are assigned to. In a natural experiment, an external event or situation (“nature”) results in the random or random-like assignment of subjects to the treatment group.

Even though some use random assignments, natural experiments are not considered to be true experiments because they are observational in nature.

Although the researchers have no control over the independent variable , they can exploit this event after the fact to study the effect of the treatment.

However, as they could not afford to cover everyone who they deemed eligible for the program, they instead allocated spots in the program based on a random lottery.

Although true experiments have higher internal validity , you might choose to use a quasi-experimental design for ethical or practical reasons.

Sometimes it would be unethical to provide or withhold a treatment on a random basis, so a true experiment is not feasible. In this case, a quasi-experiment can allow you to study the same causal relationship without the ethical issues.

The Oregon Health Study is a good example. It would be unethical to randomly provide some people with health insurance but purposely prevent others from receiving it solely for the purposes of research.

However, since the Oregon government faced financial constraints and decided to provide health insurance via lottery, studying this event after the fact is a much more ethical approach to studying the same problem.

True experimental design may be infeasible to implement or simply too expensive, particularly for researchers without access to large funding streams.

At other times, too much work is involved in recruiting and properly designing an experimental intervention for an adequate number of subjects to justify a true experiment.

In either case, quasi-experimental designs allow you to study the question by taking advantage of data that has previously been paid for or collected by others (often the government).

Quasi-experimental designs have various pros and cons compared to other types of studies.

• Higher external validity than most true experiments, because they often involve real-world interventions instead of artificial laboratory settings.
• Higher internal validity than other non-experimental types of research, because they allow you to better control for confounding variables than other types of studies do.
• Lower internal validity than true experiments—without randomization, it can be difficult to verify that all confounding variables have been accounted for.
• The use of retrospective data that has already been collected for other purposes can be inaccurate, incomplete or difficult to access.

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If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Ecological validity

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

A quasi-experiment is a type of research design that attempts to establish a cause-and-effect relationship. The main difference with a true experiment is that the groups are not randomly assigned.

In experimental research, random assignment is a way of placing participants from your sample into different groups using randomization. With this method, every member of the sample has a known or equal chance of being placed in a control group or an experimental group.

Quasi-experimental design is most useful in situations where it would be unethical or impractical to run a true experiment .

Quasi-experiments have lower internal validity than true experiments, but they often have higher external validity  as they can use real-world interventions instead of artificial laboratory settings.

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Chapter 7: Nonexperimental Research

Quasi-Experimental Research

Learning Objectives

• Explain what quasi-experimental research is and distinguish it clearly from both experimental and correlational research.
• Describe three different types of quasi-experimental research designs (nonequivalent groups, pretest-posttest, and interrupted time series) and identify examples of each one.

The prefix  quasi  means “resembling.” Thus quasi-experimental research is research that resembles experimental research but is not true experimental research. Although the independent variable is manipulated, participants are not randomly assigned to conditions or orders of conditions (Cook & Campbell, 1979). [1] Because the independent variable is manipulated before the dependent variable is measured, quasi-experimental research eliminates the directionality problem. But because participants are not randomly assigned—making it likely that there are other differences between conditions—quasi-experimental research does not eliminate the problem of confounding variables. In terms of internal validity, therefore, quasi-experiments are generally somewhere between correlational studies and true experiments.

Quasi-experiments are most likely to be conducted in field settings in which random assignment is difficult or impossible. They are often conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment—perhaps a type of psychotherapy or an educational intervention. There are many different kinds of quasi-experiments, but we will discuss just a few of the most common ones here.

Nonequivalent Groups Design

Recall that when participants in a between-subjects experiment are randomly assigned to conditions, the resulting groups are likely to be quite similar. In fact, researchers consider them to be equivalent. When participants are not randomly assigned to conditions, however, the resulting groups are likely to be dissimilar in some ways. For this reason, researchers consider them to be nonequivalent. A  nonequivalent groups design , then, is a between-subjects design in which participants have not been randomly assigned to conditions.

Imagine, for example, a researcher who wants to evaluate a new method of teaching fractions to third graders. One way would be to conduct a study with a treatment group consisting of one class of third-grade students and a control group consisting of another class of third-grade students. This design would be a nonequivalent groups design because the students are not randomly assigned to classes by the researcher, which means there could be important differences between them. For example, the parents of higher achieving or more motivated students might have been more likely to request that their children be assigned to Ms. Williams’s class. Or the principal might have assigned the “troublemakers” to Mr. Jones’s class because he is a stronger disciplinarian. Of course, the teachers’ styles, and even the classroom environments, might be very different and might cause different levels of achievement or motivation among the students. If at the end of the study there was a difference in the two classes’ knowledge of fractions, it might have been caused by the difference between the teaching methods—but it might have been caused by any of these confounding variables.

Of course, researchers using a nonequivalent groups design can take steps to ensure that their groups are as similar as possible. In the present example, the researcher could try to select two classes at the same school, where the students in the two classes have similar scores on a standardized math test and the teachers are the same sex, are close in age, and have similar teaching styles. Taking such steps would increase the internal validity of the study because it would eliminate some of the most important confounding variables. But without true random assignment of the students to conditions, there remains the possibility of other important confounding variables that the researcher was not able to control.

Pretest-Posttest Design

In a  pretest-posttest design , the dependent variable is measured once before the treatment is implemented and once after it is implemented. Imagine, for example, a researcher who is interested in the effectiveness of an antidrug education program on elementary school students’ attitudes toward illegal drugs. The researcher could measure the attitudes of students at a particular elementary school during one week, implement the antidrug program during the next week, and finally, measure their attitudes again the following week. The pretest-posttest design is much like a within-subjects experiment in which each participant is tested first under the control condition and then under the treatment condition. It is unlike a within-subjects experiment, however, in that the order of conditions is not counterbalanced because it typically is not possible for a participant to be tested in the treatment condition first and then in an “untreated” control condition.

If the average posttest score is better than the average pretest score, then it makes sense to conclude that the treatment might be responsible for the improvement. Unfortunately, one often cannot conclude this with a high degree of certainty because there may be other explanations for why the posttest scores are better. One category of alternative explanations goes under the name of  history . Other things might have happened between the pretest and the posttest. Perhaps an antidrug program aired on television and many of the students watched it, or perhaps a celebrity died of a drug overdose and many of the students heard about it. Another category of alternative explanations goes under the name of  maturation . Participants might have changed between the pretest and the posttest in ways that they were going to anyway because they are growing and learning. If it were a yearlong program, participants might become less impulsive or better reasoners and this might be responsible for the change.

Another alternative explanation for a change in the dependent variable in a pretest-posttest design is  regression to the mean . This refers to the statistical fact that an individual who scores extremely on a variable on one occasion will tend to score less extremely on the next occasion. For example, a bowler with a long-term average of 150 who suddenly bowls a 220 will almost certainly score lower in the next game. Her score will “regress” toward her mean score of 150. Regression to the mean can be a problem when participants are selected for further study  because  of their extreme scores. Imagine, for example, that only students who scored especially low on a test of fractions are given a special training program and then retested. Regression to the mean all but guarantees that their scores will be higher even if the training program has no effect. A closely related concept—and an extremely important one in psychological research—is  spontaneous remission . This is the tendency for many medical and psychological problems to improve over time without any form of treatment. The common cold is a good example. If one were to measure symptom severity in 100 common cold sufferers today, give them a bowl of chicken soup every day, and then measure their symptom severity again in a week, they would probably be much improved. This does not mean that the chicken soup was responsible for the improvement, however, because they would have been much improved without any treatment at all. The same is true of many psychological problems. A group of severely depressed people today is likely to be less depressed on average in 6 months. In reviewing the results of several studies of treatments for depression, researchers Michael Posternak and Ivan Miller found that participants in waitlist control conditions improved an average of 10 to 15% before they received any treatment at all (Posternak & Miller, 2001) [2] . Thus one must generally be very cautious about inferring causality from pretest-posttest designs.

Does Psychotherapy Work?

Early studies on the effectiveness of psychotherapy tended to use pretest-posttest designs. In a classic 1952 article, researcher Hans Eysenck summarized the results of 24 such studies showing that about two thirds of patients improved between the pretest and the posttest (Eysenck, 1952) [3] . But Eysenck also compared these results with archival data from state hospital and insurance company records showing that similar patients recovered at about the same rate  without  receiving psychotherapy. This parallel suggested to Eysenck that the improvement that patients showed in the pretest-posttest studies might be no more than spontaneous remission. Note that Eysenck did not conclude that psychotherapy was ineffective. He merely concluded that there was no evidence that it was, and he wrote of “the necessity of properly planned and executed experimental studies into this important field” (p. 323). You can read the entire article here: Classics in the History of Psychology .

Fortunately, many other researchers took up Eysenck’s challenge, and by 1980 hundreds of experiments had been conducted in which participants were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions, and the results were summarized in a classic book by Mary Lee Smith, Gene Glass, and Thomas Miller (Smith, Glass, & Miller, 1980) [4] . They found that overall psychotherapy was quite effective, with about 80% of treatment participants improving more than the average control participant. Subsequent research has focused more on the conditions under which different types of psychotherapy are more or less effective.

Interrupted Time Series Design

A variant of the pretest-posttest design is the  interrupted time-series design . A time series is a set of measurements taken at intervals over a period of time. For example, a manufacturing company might measure its workers’ productivity each week for a year. In an interrupted time series-design, a time series like this one is “interrupted” by a treatment. In one classic example, the treatment was the reduction of the work shifts in a factory from 10 hours to 8 hours (Cook & Campbell, 1979) [5] . Because productivity increased rather quickly after the shortening of the work shifts, and because it remained elevated for many months afterward, the researcher concluded that the shortening of the shifts caused the increase in productivity. Notice that the interrupted time-series design is like a pretest-posttest design in that it includes measurements of the dependent variable both before and after the treatment. It is unlike the pretest-posttest design, however, in that it includes multiple pretest and posttest measurements.

Figure 7.3 shows data from a hypothetical interrupted time-series study. The dependent variable is the number of student absences per week in a research methods course. The treatment is that the instructor begins publicly taking attendance each day so that students know that the instructor is aware of who is present and who is absent. The top panel of  Figure 7.3 shows how the data might look if this treatment worked. There is a consistently high number of absences before the treatment, and there is an immediate and sustained drop in absences after the treatment. The bottom panel of  Figure 7.3 shows how the data might look if this treatment did not work. On average, the number of absences after the treatment is about the same as the number before. This figure also illustrates an advantage of the interrupted time-series design over a simpler pretest-posttest design. If there had been only one measurement of absences before the treatment at Week 7 and one afterward at Week 8, then it would have looked as though the treatment were responsible for the reduction. The multiple measurements both before and after the treatment suggest that the reduction between Weeks 7 and 8 is nothing more than normal week-to-week variation.

Combination Designs

A type of quasi-experimental design that is generally better than either the nonequivalent groups design or the pretest-posttest design is one that combines elements of both. There is a treatment group that is given a pretest, receives a treatment, and then is given a posttest. But at the same time there is a control group that is given a pretest, does  not  receive the treatment, and then is given a posttest. The question, then, is not simply whether participants who receive the treatment improve but whether they improve  more  than participants who do not receive the treatment.

Imagine, for example, that students in one school are given a pretest on their attitudes toward drugs, then are exposed to an antidrug program, and finally are given a posttest. Students in a similar school are given the pretest, not exposed to an antidrug program, and finally are given a posttest. Again, if students in the treatment condition become more negative toward drugs, this change in attitude could be an effect of the treatment, but it could also be a matter of history or maturation. If it really is an effect of the treatment, then students in the treatment condition should become more negative than students in the control condition. But if it is a matter of history (e.g., news of a celebrity drug overdose) or maturation (e.g., improved reasoning), then students in the two conditions would be likely to show similar amounts of change. This type of design does not completely eliminate the possibility of confounding variables, however. Something could occur at one of the schools but not the other (e.g., a student drug overdose), so students at the first school would be affected by it while students at the other school would not.

Finally, if participants in this kind of design are randomly assigned to conditions, it becomes a true experiment rather than a quasi experiment. In fact, it is the kind of experiment that Eysenck called for—and that has now been conducted many times—to demonstrate the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

Key Takeaways

• Quasi-experimental research involves the manipulation of an independent variable without the random assignment of participants to conditions or orders of conditions. Among the important types are nonequivalent groups designs, pretest-posttest, and interrupted time-series designs.
• Quasi-experimental research eliminates the directionality problem because it involves the manipulation of the independent variable. It does not eliminate the problem of confounding variables, however, because it does not involve random assignment to conditions. For these reasons, quasi-experimental research is generally higher in internal validity than correlational studies but lower than true experiments.
• Practice: Imagine that two professors decide to test the effect of giving daily quizzes on student performance in a statistics course. They decide that Professor A will give quizzes but Professor B will not. They will then compare the performance of students in their two sections on a common final exam. List five other variables that might differ between the two sections that could affect the results.
• regression to the mean
• spontaneous remission

Image Descriptions

Figure 7.3 image description: Two line graphs charting the number of absences per week over 14 weeks. The first 7 weeks are without treatment and the last 7 weeks are with treatment. In the first line graph, there are between 4 to 8 absences each week. After the treatment, the absences drop to 0 to 3 each week, which suggests the treatment worked. In the second line graph, there is no noticeable change in the number of absences per week after the treatment, which suggests the treatment did not work. [Return to Figure 7.3]

• Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (1979). Quasi-experimentation: Design & analysis issues in field settings . Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. ↵
• Posternak, M. A., & Miller, I. (2001). Untreated short-term course of major depression: A meta-analysis of studies using outcomes from studies using wait-list control groups. Journal of Affective Disorders, 66 , 139–146. ↵
• Eysenck, H. J. (1952). The effects of psychotherapy: An evaluation. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 16 , 319–324. ↵
• Smith, M. L., Glass, G. V., & Miller, T. I. (1980). The benefits of psychotherapy . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ↵

A between-subjects design in which participants have not been randomly assigned to conditions.

The dependent variable is measured once before the treatment is implemented and once after it is implemented.

A category of alternative explanations for differences between scores such as events that happened between the pretest and posttest, unrelated to the study.

An alternative explanation that refers to how the participants might have changed between the pretest and posttest in ways that they were going to anyway because they are growing and learning.

The statistical fact that an individual who scores extremely on a variable on one occasion will tend to score less extremely on the next occasion.

The tendency for many medical and psychological problems to improve over time without any form of treatment.

A set of measurements taken at intervals over a period of time that are interrupted by a treatment.

Research Methods in Psychology - 2nd Canadian Edition Copyright © 2015 by Paul C. Price, Rajiv Jhangiani, & I-Chant A. Chiang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Introduction to quasi-experimental designs

Share content, what is a quasi-experimental design (qed).

A QED is a type of evaluation design that estimates the causal impact of an intervention on a sample without random assignment. There are many types of QEDs, but they all involve statistically generating a counterfactual (a way of simulating what would have happened if the intervention/programme had not taken place) without random assignment. The impact of the intervention can be measured by comparing the outcomes of the counterfactual and the intervention participants.

QEDs are commonly used in research and evaluation but knowing how to use them can be a challenge.

Video explainer: Introduction to QEDs

Find out more about QEDs in our video explainer.

Planning a QED (webinar and guide)

Watch our webinar on planning a QED, part of the ‘Evaluating causal impact’ series.

Read this step-by-step guidance to learn about the key stages of running a QED: Diagnose, Plan, Measure, Reflect.

• Read Planning a quasi-experimental design evaluation (PDF)

An introduction to QEDs: causal evaluation methodologies without randomisation (webinar)

View our webinar session, ‘An introduction to QEDs: causal evaluation methodologies without randomisation’, part of our ‘Unlocking effective evaluation’ series in 2022. It includes:

• An introduction to quasi-experimental designs
• Difference-in-difference method
• Regression discontinuity design
• Q&A with the audience

QEDs: external resources

Find out more about QEDs. This list includes a range of books, articles and videos explaining the background, methodology and practice of QEDs.

• Access additional resources on quasi-experimental designs (PDF)

Document accessibility: TASO is committed to making all documents accessible for all audiences. If you have any difficulty accessing the links or documents, or need these resources in another format, please email [email protected].

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Quasi experiment

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Natural Experiments

Last updated 22 Mar 2021

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Experiments look for the effect that manipulated variables (independent variables, or IVs) have on measured variables (dependent variables, or DVs), i.e. causal effects.

Natural experiments are studies where the experimenter cannot manipulate the IV, so the DV is simply measured and judged as the effect of an IV. For this reason, participants cannot be randomly allocated to experimental groups as they are already pre-set, making them quasi-experiments . For instance, an experiment might investigate the relative levels of aggression observed in boys and girls in a primary school (the experimenter cannot manipulate who belongs to the ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ groups).

Evaluation of natural experiments:

- The natural settings where such experiments take place mean that results will have high ecological validity (i.e. they should relate well to real life behaviour).

- Demand characteristics are often not a problem, unlike laboratory experiments (i.e. participants are less likely to adjust their natural behaviour according to their interpretation of the study’s purpose, as they might not know they are taking part in a study).

- Being unable to randomly allocate participants to conditions means that sample bias may be an issue (e.g. other extraneous variables that change with the pre-set IV group differences may confound the results, meaning a causal IV-DV effect is unlikely).

- Ethical issues such as lack of informed consent commonly arise, as deception is often required; debriefing, once the observation/experiment has ended, is necessary.

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