RCTs in criminology, education, and international development

Criminology

A 2005 review found 83 randomized experiments in criminology published in 1982-2004, compared with only 35 published in 1957-1981. [ 80 ] The authors classified the studies they found into five categories: "policing", "prevention", "corrections", "court", and "community". [ 80 ] Focusing only on offending behavior programs, Hollin (2008) argued that RCTs may be difficult to implement (e. g. if an RCT required "passing sentences that would randomly assign offenders to programmes") and therefore that experiments with quasi-experimental design are still necessary. [ 81 ]

Education

RCTs have been used in evaluating a number of educational interventions. For example, a 2009 study randomized 260 elementary school teachers' classrooms to receive or not receive a program of behavioral screening, classroom intervention, and parent training, and then measured the behavioral and academic performance of their students. [ 82 ] Another 2009 study randomized classrooms for 678 first-grade children to receive a classroom-centered intervention, a parent-centered intervention, or no intervention, and then followed their academic outcomes through age 19. [ 83 ]

International development

RCTs are currently being used by a number of international development experts to measure the impact of development interventions worldwide. Development economists at research organizations including Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab [ 84 ] [ 85 ] and Innovations for Poverty Action [ 86 ] have used RCTs to measure the effectiveness of poverty, health, and education programs in the developing world. While RCTs can be useful in policy evaluation, it is necessary to exercise care in interpreting the results in social science settings. For example, interventions can inadvertently induce socioeconomic and behavioral changes that can confound the relationships (Bhargava, 2008).

For some development economists, the main benefit to using RCTs compared to other research methods is that randomization guards against selection bias, a problem present in many current studies of development policy. In one notable example of a cluster RCT in the field of development economics, Olken (2007) randomized 608 villages in Indonesia in which roads were about to be built into six groups (no audit vs. audit, and no invitations to accountability meetings vs. invitations to accountability meetings vs. invitations to accountability meetings along with anonymous comment forms). [ 87 ] After estimating "missing expenditures" (a measure of corruption ), Olken concluded that government audits were more effective than "increasing grassroots participation in monitoring" in reducing corruption. [ 87 ] However, similar conclusions can also be reached by suitable modeling of the data from longitudinal studies. Overall, it is important in social sciences to account for the intended as well as the unintended consequences of interventions for policy evaluations.