השוואת שיטות

	ניסוי שדה	ניסוי טבעי
תחום	תכנון ניסויים	תכנון ניסויים
משפחה	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
שנת המקור	1920s–1930s (agriculture); 1990s–2000s (social sciences)	1990s (formal methodological articulation); earlier in epidemiology (John Snow, 1854)
הוגה השיטה	Formalized by R. A. Fisher (1935); systematized in social sciences by Harrison & List (2004)	Varied; systematized in econometrics and political science (e.g., Meyer 1995; Angrist & Krueger 1991)
סוג	Experimental design	Quasi-experimental research design
מקור מכונן	Harrison, G. W., & List, J. A. (2004). Field experiments. Journal of Economic Literature, 42(4), 1009–1055.	Meyer, B. D. (1995). Natural and quasi-experiments in economics. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 13(2), 151–161.
כינויים	field trial, natural field experiment, randomized field experiment, field RCT	natural quasi-experiment, naturally occurring experiment, exogenous shock design, as-if randomization
קשורות	5	3
תקציר	A field experiment applies the logic of a randomized controlled trial in a naturally occurring, real-world environment rather than an artificial laboratory. Participants are randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions while going about everyday activities, allowing researchers to estimate causal effects with high internal validity while preserving a level of ecological realism that laboratory settings cannot offer. The design is especially prominent in economics, public health, political science, and development research.	A natural experiment exploits a real-world event, policy, or circumstance that assigns individuals to treatment and control conditions in a way that is plausibly random — or at least exogenous to the outcome of interest. Because the researcher does not control assignment, it occupies a middle ground between a true randomized controlled trial and purely observational research, offering stronger causal leverage than conventional observational designs when the as-if randomization assumption holds.