Explaining Random Assignment Posted on February 15, 2006 Robert C. Pianta (bio) discusses the need to clearly communicate aspects of your research design with schools.

I think one of the things that often times can be undermined when we're building partnerships with schools is that the researcher often times feels like they're having to give away certain design principles. Random assignment is always one of the things that's very hard to achieve, but even randomly selecting 4 or 5 kids out of a class when you want to represent a classroom, or trying to select a certain group of kids that you might think might be at risk and selecting another group of kids. All those things are things sometimes that school systems may respond to with some questions.

This is where it comes back to the researcher really needing to be clear with the school system why those things are important considerations. In my view, the clarity in the researcher's mind of the importance of certain features of the study or the actual ultimate design and implications of the study, if they can make that very clear to the school system people, then these design principles won't be undermined. But if they don't, then often times those principles get undermined, and you end up with mush in the end.

In a sense, it may very well be the case that as an investigator you're trying to negotiate with one school system, and it just simply doesn't work, and you should then move on to another one because in the end, you're going to put an awful lot of effort into a study that you have a big stake in professionally. I think it's important to preserve the features of research design that are going to make that effort be worthwhile in the long-run.

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