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Political Analysis Advance Access originally published online on November 16, 2006
Political Analysis 2007 15(1):1-20; doi:10.1093/pan/mpl008
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Logic of the Survey Experiment Reexamined

Brian J. Gaines and James H. Kuklinski

Department of Political Science and Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 702 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801

Paul J. Quirk

Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, 2329 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z4 e-mail: quirk{at}politics.ubc.ca

e-mail: bjgaines{at}uiuc.edu (corresponding author) e-mail: kuklinsk{at}ad.uiuc.edu

Scholars of political behavior increasingly embed experimental designs in opinion surveys by randomly assigning respondents alternative versions of questionnaire items. Such experiments have major advantages: they are simple to implement and they dodge some of the difficulties of making inferences from conventional survey data. But survey experiments are no panacea. We identify problems of inference associated with typical uses of survey experiments in political science and highlight a range of difficulties, some of which have straightforward solutions within the survey-experimental approach and some of which can be dealt with only by exercising greater caution in interpreting findings and bringing to bear alternative strategies of research.


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