Experiments

The use of experiments in the social sciences has a long history. Some disciplines employ this methodology more often than others, for example psychology, but since the end of the last century, their application has become widespread in other domains, like economics, political science and sociology. One chapter is not sufficient to cover the ground of the multiple shape and forms that experiments can take, and they can vary in their settings and in their design, the latter includes both the formal elements of groups allocations, counterbalancing and other features, but it also consists of the type of experimental tasks. In this chapter I will discuss the main common methodological principles of experimental design to all these variants and, later, I will briefly discuss online experiments as population-based survey experiments because I consider this form the most promising in the context of sociological research.