ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Quasi-experiment

Have you ever played a game where someone sets up the rules and then you play the game to see what will happen? That's basically what a quasi-experiment is!

In a quasi-experiment, just like in a regular experiment, someone sets up the rules to see what happens next. But unlike a regular experiment, a quasi-experiment doesn't have all the same features that make an experiment truly "scientific."

This means that in a quasi-experiment, researchers might not be able to control all the variables (factors) that impact the results. They also might not be able to randomly assign people to different groups (like in a regular experiment).

Despite these differences, a quasi-experiment can still help us learn more about how different things might be connected. For example, maybe some researchers want to know if a new teaching method will help kids learn better. They might set up a quasi-experiment where they compare how well one group of kids learns with the new method to how well another group of kids learns without it.

Overall, quasi-experiments can give us some good ideas about how different things are connected, even if they don't have all the same features as a true scientific experiment!