Audits & Social Experiments

A Report Prepared for the U.S. General Accounting Office Gao ID: PAD-79-1 October 1, 1978

Under contract with GAO, the Social Science Research Council conducted a study on methods and techniques for auditing social experiments. Its report focused on the use of reinterviews and other alternatives for monitoring research quality, the general problem of quality assurance, and the roles which GAO might take in meeting its oversight responsibility.

There were not enough instances of the use of the reinterview to predict its impact on research participants, but there seems to be a significant risk of its disrupting research. Possible alternatives to reinterviews are the use of information on research procedures to determine quality, parallel sampling by auditors, surrogate auditors, subsample for reinterviews by auditors, and record-linking and other statistical techniques. GAO possible contributions in social experiments at various stages of the research and evaluation process were identified. The potential costs and benefits of audits were considered as applied to researchers, sponsors, and participants in social experiments. The roles of sponsors were discussed with regard to developing and implementing solicitations, the monitoring of projects, and the dissemination of the project's results. Responsibilities of the researcher were considered in terms of ensuring the quality of research.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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