What it cannot do, however, is answer questions about statistical relationships between variables. This detail is a point that beginning researchers sometimes miss. Imagine, for example, a group of research methods students interested in the relationship between children’s being the victim of bullying and the children’s self-esteem.

on-experimental research is appropriate—even necessary—when these conditions are not met. There are many ways in which preferring non-experimental research can be the case.

process of random assignment is a tried and true method for equating confounds between conditions.

This matching is a matter of controlling these extraneous participant variables across conditions so that they do not become confounding variables.