"PUBLICITY" AS A PROBLEM IN THE INTERNAL VALIDITY OF TIME SERIES QUASI-EXPERIMENTS |
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| Authors: | Jerome S. Legge Jr. Larry Webb |
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| Affiliation: | JEROME S. LEGGE, JR. is Director of the Graduate Program in Public Administration in the Political Science Department at the University of Georgia. He holds a joint appointment with the Institute of Government. Included among his publications are articles in the Public Administration Review;and Administration and Society, among others. Presently, he is working on a book on abortion policy. LARRY WEBB is the Director of the Management Information Unit of the Division of Youth Services, Georgia Department of Human Resources. He has published articles in the Criminal Justice Review and the Juvenile and Family Courr Journal;. Presently he i s working on a study of female delinquency and the determinants of placement of juveniles. He has also served as a political consultant to Georgia political campaigns. |
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| 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." |
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