Howard Bloom, MDRC’s Chief Social Scientist, has contributed a chapter, “The Core Analytics of Randomized Experiments for Social Research,” to The SAGE Handbook of Social Research Methods, edited by Pertti Alasuutari, Leonard Bickman, and Julia Brannen, which will be published in late March by SAGE Publications.

The handbook includes chapters on each phase of the research process: research design, methods of data collection, and the processes of analyzing and interpreting data. As its editors maintain, there is much more to research than learning skills and techniques; methodology involves the fit between theory, research questions, research design, and analysis. The book also includes several chapters that describe historical and current directions in social research, debating crucial subjects such as qualitative versus quantitative paradigms, how to judge the credibility of types of research, and the increasingly topical issue of research ethics.

Bloom’s chapter examines the core analytic elements of randomized experiments for social research. Its goal is to provide a compact discussion of the design and analysis of randomized experiments for measuring the impact of social or educational interventions.