"PUBLICITY" AS A PROBLEM IN THE INTERNAL VALIDITY OF TIME SERIES QUASI‐EXPERIMENTS

In: Review of Policy Research, Band 2, Heft 2, S. 293-299

Abstract

Scholars who work with time series quasi‐experiments have identified "publicity" as a problem in the interpretation of such research designs. The present study utilizes three examples of the role of publicity in three social interventions: the Romanian abortion restriction of 1966; the British breathalyzer crackdown; and, the 1978 Georgia Status Offender Act. The authors conclude that publicity is most likely to be a problem in internal validity when (1) the intervention is not truly abrupt and (2) a broad "policy" is evaluated as opposed to a "program."