Limits on Realism (cont.)
- Designing for the broadest consensus leads to generic frameworks and laboratory rather than operational research with the associated pros & cons
- - naturalistic observation (no control)
- useful in learning what happens (often surprising)
- findings generalize readily to similar situations
- but more difficult to learn why something happened, or play “what if”
- - experiments (maximal control of variables)
- better for making a case for causality
- but more difficult to generalize to the “real” world