Steven Levitt, the author of Freakonomics, is exemplary in his ability to make data tell “stories.” Students of public administration and organizational behavior
are familiar with the famous Hawthorne effect. Levitt and List’s (2009) reanalysis of the original Hawthorne study (which uses incomplete, archived, and
secondary data) shows how management programs that were developed to increase worker productivity can be evaluated or reevaluated, even though the
experiments were conducted almost a century ago.
Discuss a descriiption of at least two data collection problems that the reanalysis of Levitt and List might bring to the Hawthorne effect.
