Validity and Social Experimentation

Leonard Bickman, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and Public Policy. He is director of the Center for Evaluation and Program Improvement and Associate Dean for Research at Peabody College. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology (social) from the City University of New York, his master's degree in experimental psychopathology from Columbia University and his bachelor's from the City College of New York. Professor Bickman is a nationally recognized leader in program evaluation and mental healthservices research on children and adolescents. He has published more than 15 books and monographs and 180 articles and chapters and has been principal investigator on over 25 major grants from several agencies. He is co-editor of the Applied Research Methods Series published by Sage Publications since 1980. He is also co-editor of the Handbook of Applied Social Research and is collaborating on a new International Handbook of Social Research. He is the co-author of the very popular book Applied Research Design: A Practical Guide.

PART ONE: VALIDITY ISSUES Towards a Practical Theory of External Validity - Thomas D Cook Paul Wortman, Elvira Elek-Fisk and Lanette Raymond Validity Applied to Meta-Analyses and Research Syntheses Discriminative Validity - Norman Miller, William C Pedersen and Vicki E Pollock Statistical Conclusion Validity for Intervention Research - Mark Lipsey A Significant (p 05) Problem Effect Sizes in Behavioral and Biomedical Research - Robert Rosenthal Estimation and Interpretatio Realism, Validity and the Experimenting Society - Melvin Mark PART TWO: SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS Toward the Dream of the Experimenting Society - Robert G St Pierre and Michael J Puma The Honestly Experimenting Society - Robert Boruch and Ellen Foley Sites and Other Entities as the Unit of Allocation and Analysis Rival Explanations as an Alternative to Reforms as 'Experiments' - Robert K Yin Donald T Campbell's Contributions to Practical 'In the Trenches' Program Evaluation - Burt Perrin The Experimenting Society in a Political World - Carol H Weiss