Overlooked or Undercooked? Critical Review & Recommendations for Experimental Methods in Diversity Research

Diversity research often relies on experiments to make causal claims about the effects of various attributes (e.g., gender or race/ethnicity) on organizationally-relevant outcomes. With this method, scholars intervene, then analyze the effect of the intervention on one or more outcomes. Until now, however, there remains a lack of clear, practical guidance on how to best study the effects of these attributes via experiments, including some of the theoretical and ethical implications that these design and method decisions might entail. Thus, we review the literature on experimental diversity research in organizations, highlighting illustrative publications and their design choices. Throughout, we highlight some strengths and potential pitfalls of these approaches. In line with the approach of this methods anthology, we also describe a recent set of experimental studies on intersecting aspects of diversity by the first author of this chapter (Gloor, Li, & Puhl, 2018) to practically exemplify some of the themes discussed within this chapter. We conclude with a discussion of ethical implications.