Experimental Methods and Policy

Catalog description

How can public health officials design public service announcements to raise awareness about disease? What is the most effective way for school administrators to decrease high school dropout rates? How do civic organizations encourage participation in local meetings? This course offers a way to answer these questions using experimental research methods. This course introduces experimental methods and covers how they can be incorporated while drafting, implementing, and evaluating policy. The course will cover the mathematical logic of experiments as design-based causal inference, the strengths and weaknesses of different types of experimental designs, mathematical strategies to analyze experimental results, and the programming tools to conduct experiments. The class will be centered around applying these skills to policy creation and evaluation, culminating in each student designing an experiment to shape a policy area of their choice.