Intervention Tournaments: Overview of Concept, Design, and Implementation with Dr. Boaz Hameiri

The Carter School Research Committee, with support from the Dean's Office, is hosting a series of "Methods Mondays" presentations in Fall 2022. These hour-long tutorials feature presentations by internal and external experts on their research methodology to expose graduate students to different types of peace and conflict research methodologies. These events will culminate in a research symposium for graduate students across the conflict resolution field in spring 2023. Additional information on the symposium is forthcoming.

The featured speaker for the November 7th Methods Monday will be Dr. Boaz Hameiri, Senior Lecturer in the Program in Conflict Management and Mediation at Tel Aviv University. A large portion of research in the social sciences is devoted to using interventions to combat societal and social problems, such as prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup conflict. However, these interventions are often developed using the theories and/or intuitions of the individuals who developed them and evaluated in isolation without comparing their efficacy with other interventions. In this presentation, Dr. Hameiri will make the case for an experimental design that addresses such issues: an intervention tournament—that is, a study that compares several different interventions against a single control and uses the same standardized outcome measures during assessment and participants drawn from the same population. Dr. Hameiri will begin by highlighting the utility of intervention tournaments as an approach that complements other, more commonly used approaches to addressing societal issues. He will then describe various approaches to intervention tournaments, which include crowdsourced, curated, and in-house-developed intervention tournaments, and their unique characteristics. Finally, he will discuss practical recommendations and key design insights for conducting such research, given the existing literature. These include considerations of intervention-tournament deployment, characteristics of included interventions, statistical analysis and reporting, study design, longitudinal and underlying psychological mechanism assessment, and theoretical ramifications.