Benefits of Experimental Design
Experimental design involves designing experiments for testing hypotheses though controlling experiment factors so as to predict or establish a result based on dependent and independent variables. It offers a framework where a researcher creates an experiment to confirm or deny certain allegations. Below are some of the benefits of experimental design.
1. Cause-effect relationships
The experimental design gives investigators or researchers adequate control to analyze and establish cause-effect relationships. Through setting up experiments and implementing them, researchers can find out the reason for the occurrence of various things. This is a key objective of research, which is essentially understanding the reasons and also predicting future behaviors.
2. Provides helpful insight
Experimental research offers beneficial insight that can be utilized for providing results to immediate concerns. For instance, through experimenting on various methods of teaching, an instructor can thus create an effective teaching plan. The teacher can use results got from different teaching techniques and establish the most suitable option to use, thus benefiting the students.
3. Reliable results
The other benefit of experimental design is that the utilization of quantitative measurement levels, allocation procedures, controlled environment and random selection, promote high reliability of the outcomes as well as better generalizability of results. Furthermore, the results can also be replicated, with similar results being established because of the reliability of the experiment. A researcher can be assured that the outcomes obtained are essentially true representations of the actual events. An extra advantage is that experimental design enables the generalization of results. Experiment results can be useful in other populations or settings.
The drawback of experimental design is that it requires large samples so that results can be truly representative, thereby generalized to the wider population. Moreover, the experimental techniques are hard to perform in everyday settings because of the requirement of isolating variables.
