g&e ch 6

i realized only this morning that i hadn't blogged my usual preview note for the upcoming chapter. i apologize; theryn will be acting as MC today, leading our class discussion, and i guess i shifted into "participant" mode a little too soon. at any rate, it's probably too late for anyone to benefit from reading my rambling thoughts (i doubt anyone is up reading my blog at 6 AM) but at least this will be here for later review and reflection.

this chapter is straightforward, mostly non-quantitative (only a couple of equations pertaining to what is -- imho -- a largely tangential bit about modelling...), and full of good advice on how to worry about all of the things that might go wrong with your field study. no, not really... but it does lay out and emphasizes well the general principles of replication and randomization, and how necessary they are in order to make the results of your hard work as generalizable (and interesting, and useful, and, therefore, publishable) as possible.

i think the authors may be a bit too sanguine about the about the possibility of controlling for or taking into account all of the potential confounding variables that may affect a field study. my perspective is that, given finite resources and time, there will always be the risk of an unmeasured covariate that presents itself as possibly important after-the-fact, but that a reasonably well replicated and randomized design minimizes (but doesn't eliminate) this risk.