Quasi-experimental designs are often used when conducting program evaluations on non-profit organizations. Examples of such organizations are police stations, fire departments, emergency rooms, and community health clinics. It is not possible to randomly assign people to go to a specific emergency room or community health clinic as this is dependent on where someone is when an emergency occurs or where someone lives- which cannot be randomly assigned. As such, a true experiment is not possible. Quasi-experiments allow researchers to collect data without random assignment. Information gained from quasi-experiments as part of program evaluation can help to improve patient care, cost-efficiency, patient satisfaction, timeliness of services, job satisfaction, and so on.

Pretend you have a grant to create a quasi-experiment to do a program evaluation on a non-profit.

What non-profit(s) would you focus on? Why?

What would be your research question?

What data would you gather? Why?

Would you want to use an employee or external consultant to collect the data? Why?

What are possible limitations to this study?