Background Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) are the modern gold standard of empirical knowledge in basically all scientific fields from economics to epidemiology. This is because RCTs eliminate the biases in conventional observational research that make it difficult to discern correlation and causation. For example, imagine that you are an education researcher and you are trying to evaluate the effectiveness of Montessori private schools on children’s future success. Simply observing the children from the Montessori school and comparing them to public school kids wouldn’t tell you anything. There are dozens of co-linear confounding variables and selection effects like parental income, geographic location, race, etc. Depending on the quality and breadth of the data it may be possible to control for some of these variables using econometric methods, but the results of an observational study like this will always be subject to scrutiny over selection issues, and rightly so.
RCTs, Epistemology, and the Minimum Wage
RCTs, Epistemology, and the Minimum Wage
RCTs, Epistemology, and the Minimum Wage
Background Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) are the modern gold standard of empirical knowledge in basically all scientific fields from economics to epidemiology. This is because RCTs eliminate the biases in conventional observational research that make it difficult to discern correlation and causation. For example, imagine that you are an education researcher and you are trying to evaluate the effectiveness of Montessori private schools on children’s future success. Simply observing the children from the Montessori school and comparing them to public school kids wouldn’t tell you anything. There are dozens of co-linear confounding variables and selection effects like parental income, geographic location, race, etc. Depending on the quality and breadth of the data it may be possible to control for some of these variables using econometric methods, but the results of an observational study like this will always be subject to scrutiny over selection issues, and rightly so.