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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 single factor experimental design 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, and please respond to the following:

• 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?