A pre-experimental design is a simple research process that happens before the actual experimental design takes place. The goal is to obtain preliminary results to gauge whether the financial and time investment of a true experiment will be worth it.
Pre-experimental design example
A researcher wants to investigate the effect of a new type of meditation on stress levels in college students. They decide to conduct a small pre-experiment with 10 college students who are already interested in meditation.
The students are asked to participate in a 30-minute meditation session once a week for 4 weeks. The students’ stress levels are measured before and after the meditation sessions with a standardized questionnaire.
The researcher compares the outcomes and notices significant differences in stress scores. They decide to move forward with a more costly and time-consuming experiment where they take into account all criteria for an experimental design (e.g., random assignment of participants, control group, controlling for extraneous variables).