The Promising Integration of Qualitative Methods and Field Experiments

Elizabeth Levy Paluck
Additional contact information
Elizabeth Levy Paluck: Princeton University

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2010, vol. 628, issue 1, 59-71

Abstract: Randomized field experiments should take a more central place in qualitative research. Although field experimentation is often considered a quantitative enterprise, this paper illustrates the compatibility of field experimentation with various types of qualitative measurement tools and research questions. Integrating qualitative and quantitative data within field experiments allows investigators to move past simple average treatment effects and explore mechanisms of the identified causal effect. A more novel proposal is to use field experimentation as the organizing methodological framework for archival, ethnographic, or interpretive work, and to use ethnographic methods as the primary source of measurement in “experimental ethnography.†Sustained research and theoretical specificity can address some of the seemingly incompatible features of qualitative and field experimental methods. For example, small sample sizes are acceptable as part of a research program, and some theories of historical patterns or rare events could be disaggregated into smaller cause-and-effect linkages to test with field experiments in theoretically relevant contexts.

Keywords: field experimentation; qualitative methods; experimental ethnography; interpretive methods; archival methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716209351510 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:628:y:2010:i:1:p:59-71

DOI: 10.1177/0002716209351510

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().