NJ Acts Biostatistics and Epidemiology Workshop Series presents:
Designing Multi-Site Studies for External Validity: Site Selection via Synthetic Purposive Sampling
Thursday, April 9, 2026 at 12pm on Zoom
REGISTER HERE Links to an external site.
Speaker:
Dr. Naoki Egami
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Workshop Description:
Multi-site experiments have become a popular strategy to address the most common and
challenging external validity concerns — whether and how experimental results generalize
across sites, e.g., states, schools, and hospitals. Under such studies, scholars conduct a
randomized experiment in each site and evaluate whether findings generalize across sites.
Despite the potential, there has been little guidance on the fundamental research design
question—how should we select sites for external validity? In this workshop, we learn the
challenges of existing approaches and then introduce a new, simple approach, called the
synthetic purposing sampling (SPS). SPS combines ideas of purposive sampling and the
synthetic control method—it selects diverse sites such that non-selected sites are well
approximated by the weighted average of the selected sites. This workshop illustrates its
general applicability using both experimental and observational studies.