The randomized experimental design

The Importance of Random Assignment

This short paper assignment will require you to explain the importance of random assignment in psychological research. Prompt: Imagine that you are an online tutor for an undergraduate Research Methods course. One day, you get this email:

Dear Tutor, I am having some trouble understanding why it is so important to randomly assign participants to experimental conditions. It seems to me that if you have a large enough sample, the results would probably be valid even if you didn’t bother to randomize the participants. Why is it important to go through the trouble of randomizing participants? Also, if you are going to randomly assign participants, how should you do it?