Randomized Experiments, Propensity Scores, Regression Discontinuities and Other Ways of Making Good Causal Inferences in Experiments with Human Participants: Sigma Xi Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series

Lecture/Seminar | December 4 | 3-5 p.m. |  California Room

Location:  5200 North Lake Rd, Merced, CA 95343

Speaker: Will Shadish, Professor of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts

Sponsor: Sigma Xi

Sigma Xi presents its third Distinguished Scientist lecture of the Fall semester.

Founding faculty members and Distinguished Professor Will Shadish offers a lecture entitled "Randomized Experiments, Propensity Scores, Regression Discontinuities and Other Ways of Making Good Causal Inferences in Experiments with Human Participants."

The randomized experiment is rightly regarded as a gold standard for making inferences about the effects of interventions on human participants in many settings. But it is often not feasible and sometimes not ethical. So much interdisciplinary work in the past 20 years has focused on improved causal inference from nonrandomized experiments. This includes empirical tests of how well these improvements actually do in practice when compared to randomized experiments.

Pertinent topics include propensity-score analysis, regression-discontinuity designs and short-time series analysis.

This research lays the groundwork for an empirical theory of the design of nonrandomized experiments.

Event Contact: (209) 228-4429