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Nonexperimental Research in Quantitative Research
Quantitative research for which the researcher does not manipulate an independent variable or randomly assign participants to treatment groups. Terms such as survey, correlational, descriptive, causal-comparative, ex post facto, predictive and explanatory, passive observation, natural experiments, meta-analysis, and cross-sectional and longitudinal describe the members of this family of research in the social sciences. A useful new 3 × 3 classification system classifies nonexperi-mental quantitative research along two dimensions: (1) primary research objective and (2) time. On the dimension of primary research objective, studies can be descriptive, predictive, or explanatory; on the dimension of time, research can be cross-sectional, longitudinal, or retrospective. Thus, it is possible to have nine different types of nonexperimental quantitative research, each mutually exclusive.
A major limitation of nonexperimental research in quantitative research ...