Toward a New Classification of Nonexperimental Quantitative Research

A substantial proportion of quantitative educational research is non-experimental because many important variables of interest are not manipulable. Because nonexperimental research is an important methodology employed by many researchers, it is important to use a classification system of nonexperimental methods that is highly descriptive of what we do and also allows us to communicate effectively in an interdisciplinary research environment. In this paper, the present treatment of nonexperimental methods is reviewed and critiqued, and a new, two-dimensional classification of nonexperimental quantitative research is proposed. The first dimension is based on the primary “research objective” (i.e., description, prediction, and explanation), and the second dimension is called the “time” dimension (i.e., cross-sectional, longitudinal, and retrospective).