Comments
"Greenberg, Linksz, and Mandell pry the lid off the black box of policymaking to show how a series of landmark social experiments influenced (or failed to influence) three decades of health and welfare policy at the federal and state levels — and why. In-depth interviews with key participants make this an authoritative and compelling account of those policy deliberations. This book is more than just a natural history of social experimentation; it is a careful, thoughtful analysis of the interplay between research and policy."
—Larry L. Orr
Chief Economist, Abt Associates Inc. and author of Social Experiments: Evaluating Public Programs with Experimental Methods
"This is an outstanding book that deserves a very wide audience in a range of fields: researchers who do or want to do social experiments, funders who sponsor them, the ascendant methodologists who advocate much wider use of randomized experiments, the doubters who question their omnibus utility--pretty much the whole policy research community."
—Carol Hirschon Weiss
Beatrice B. Whiting Professor, Harvard University Graduate School of Education
"In this extraordinary assessment of five of the most important social science experiments ever undertaken, Greenberg, Linksz, and Mandell review the case for experimental designs, recount the history of each experiment's evolution from idea through findings, and trace the experiments' impact on policy and practice. Teachers, policy analysts, and policymakers wrestling with the role of experimentation in social policymaking will find this comprehensive guide wonderfully informative, sensible, and full of insights."
—Gordon Berlin
Senior Vice President, MDRC
