Recommended books to learn about experimental design in Marketing CB?

[laktak]

Hey Guys,

Could you please recommend me a list of books that would teach me about experimental design in marketing CB?

[XanthusARES]

I'll need some more information here. What information about experimental design do you want? How to set up a 2x2? What types of questions we are interested in looking at? Sample size requirements? Data analysis? There really is a lot that goes into experimental design. If you want the basic idea, rather than reading books, I would suggest going into the Journal of Consumer Research and reading some papers. The CB papers in there generally do a really solid job of explicitly stating what they did and how they did it. They'll tell you specifically what their DV's are and how they were tested and same with the IV's. They'll also list what manipulation checks they did and which statistical tests they used to test their hypotheses.

 

For the record I don't think I read any books on the topic. I have some texts from classes, but experimental design mostly takes trial and error with a faculty member who is patient and willing to get abrasive when necessary.

[laktak]

Thanks for the reply, XanthusARES!

Sorry about that, I should have been more specific about my question. I want to learn the basics of everything you've mentioned in your post. Should I search for books on psychology + statistics? I've read JCR papers but I feel like I need to learn more about the background information to fully understand what is done on the paper.

On a side note, any idea why there are no books on experimental design?

[XanthusARES]

There are probably gobs of books on experimental design. I just didn't read any of them. A big portion of your first 2 years of the marketing program will be taking classes to learn the specifics of experimental design. If you want to understand the basics beforehand, I would start with a psychological stats book. That will teach you the terminology we use and understand what things like ANOVA mean. Everything else kind of comes out of a basic understanding of stats. Do you want to test whether blue or green is better at making people more hungry? Then you'll want to compare hunger levels across people who sit in a blue room with food or a green room with food. Experimental design is pretty straightforward once you get the basics of stats down. Basically experimental design consists of developing a research question, reading background material to develop hypotheses about that research question, deciding what type of tests will effectively test your hypotheses and which statistics are appropriate for those tests, running the tests, analyzing the data and finally writing up your results. Start with stats, they'll give you a good starting point.