An article I read in the NY Times about the federally funded Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) stated that keeping a preschooler in child day care a year or more increased the chances that the child would become more disruptive in class. I found even more interesting the study’s finding that this result held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center. What intrigued me most about the article is the criticism that the researchers were unable to use a research method called “random assignment” in their study. Random assignment is a research method where a study’s participants are pooled into two groups, an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group receives the treatment that the study is measuring (in this case child day care). The control group receives no treatment (no child day care). The theory is any differences between the groups are due to treatment alone. Random assignment is widely used in studies with numerous participants and currently is widely used in federally funded studies. After reading about this criticism and through my knowledge of random assignment-based research, a couple of points came to mind: •Due to ethical issues such as denying children who otherwise qualify for day care services to create a control group, testing the effects of specific treatments on a certain population is very difficult to do because it may adversely affect children’s development process. •Random assignment generally does not accurately measure the effects of cultural factors between the experiment and control groups in the results of the study. •In long-term studies such as SECCYD, it is difficult to control for unanticipated changes in the conditions between the two groups, which potentially weakens the validity of the differences when the two groups are compared. In short, while random assignment may seem like a straightforward way to do research, especially with large groups of participants, one must be aware of potential weaknesses of this method.