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Studying Identity and Behavior with Fly-on-the-Wall Studies
Scientists study quarks, atoms, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, communities, populations, the biosphere and the universe. One primary reason that epistemological complexity exists in the social sciences is because the ontological units become less like one another as the phenomena of interest grows larger and more complex. This reality necessitates an oft cited claim in scholarly…
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Fly-on-the-Wall Studies
‘Fly-on-the-Wall Studies’ capture randomly assigned or as-if randomly assigned treatment and control conditions and have a few identifying characteristics: There are a few key challenges that scholars must grapple with in order to achieve the causal inference most typically accredited to the best randomized controlled trials in the social sciences. One primary benefit of this…