Mette Kjærgaard Thomsen

Conducting Experiments in Public Management Research: A Practical Guide

ABSTRACT This article provides advice on how to meet the practical challenges of experimental methods within public management research. We focus on lab, field, and survey experiments. For each of these types of experiments we outline the major challenges and limitations encountered when implementing experiments in practice and discuss tips, standards, and common mistakes to avoid. The article is multi-authored in order to benefit from the practical lessons drawn by a number of experimental researchers.

Influencing Citizen Coproduction by Sending Encouragement and Advice: A Field Experiment

ABSTRACT The outcomes of public services, such as education, health care, and safety, are improved considerably when citizens coproduce—that is, contribute to public service provision. Governments are therefore seeking different ways to enhance citizen coproduction. Yet, empirical studies examining the effect of different government strategies to enhance citizen coproduction remain scarce and face problems of endogeneity. In this study, we examine the effect on citizen coproduction of a simple government initiative sending information material containing encouragement and advice to citizens—an often-applied strategy to enhance citizen participation. We use a field experiment on educational services (n > 1,400) to handle endogeneity problems and at the same time examine the effect in an actual public administration setting. This unique design enables us to interpret the results as reflecting causal effects of a government initiative. Using different outcome measures, we find limited effects on citizen coproduction.

Citizen Coproduction: The Influence of Self-Efficacy Perception and Knowledge of How to Coproduce

Citizen coproduction, that is, citizens’ input to the provision of public services, holds great potential to improve services provided to citizens. It is therefore important to understand why some citizens are more likely to coproduce than others. Citizens’ skills and knowledge to coproduce are argued to be crucial for their contribution to coproduction, but research on this topic is sparse. Building on coproduction theory supplemented with theoretical insights from social psychology theory, the main contribution of this study is to develop theoretical arguments that describe how self-efficacy perception may moderate the influence of knowledge of how to coproduce on citizen coproduction undertaken by individual citizens. A large-N study in the field of education is used to examine this relation.

Parental time investments in children: Evidence from Denmark

Numerous time use studies consistently find that highly educated parents spend more time with their children and more time on developmental activities than do less educated parents. Nevertheless, few empirical studies have examined whether and how these inequalities in parental caring are related to children’s educational performance. This study aims to provide a more complete picture of how parental time spent with children is related to children’s educational performance than offered by prior studies. Unique couple-based time diaries from cohabiting/married couples in Denmark combined with register data on children’s final exams in ninth grade were used to examine different associations between parental time investment in children and children’s educational performance. The study shows a significant overall association between parental time spent on developmental care and children’s educational performance. Moreover, additional analyses reveal that this association is mainly driven by low socioeconomic status children who receive more than 20 minutes of developmental care daily.

The Effect of Teacher's Aides in the Classroom: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

Countries around the world use teacher’s aides to support students, although there is no strong evidence of any positive impact on student outcomes. We use a randomized trial to challenge this state of evidence. We compare two treatment groups — aides with and without teaching degrees — to a control group. With a fixed budget, assistants without formal teaching qualifications can spend more time in the classrooms and tend to have a greater impact on students than co-teachers with a formal degree. These results are consistent with the notion that the teaching dosage is important for the positive effect of teacher’s aides