One indirect advantage of RCTs is that I’d guess (I’d imagine this has been tested somewhere) that they are easier to understand compared to other causal inference methods. Maybe that makes it easier to pitch to people who aren’t trained in statistics (often policy makers).
If you do find it, I’d be interested to read that.
I would guess that it’s difficult for people to intuitively understand precisely why randomization is so useful, although other aspects of RCTs are probably easier to grasp – particularly, the experimental part of giving treatment A to one group and treatment B to another group and following up their outcomes. But overall I think I would agree with you; people need less understanding of confounders and selection bias to read an RCT than they’d need to read an observational study.
One indirect advantage of RCTs is that I’d guess (I’d imagine this has been tested somewhere) that they are easier to understand compared to other causal inference methods. Maybe that makes it easier to pitch to people who aren’t trained in statistics (often policy makers).
Not sure of this though...
Actually I could be incorrect. I think Eva Vivalt has a paper on this (no time to dig up right now).
If you do find it, I’d be interested to read that.
I would guess that it’s difficult for people to intuitively understand precisely why randomization is so useful, although other aspects of RCTs are probably easier to grasp – particularly, the experimental part of giving treatment A to one group and treatment B to another group and following up their outcomes. But overall I think I would agree with you; people need less understanding of confounders and selection bias to read an RCT than they’d need to read an observational study.
I think it’s this paper http://evavivalt.com/wp-content/uploads/Weighing-the-Evidence.pdf. Fwiw, all of Eva’s papers are worth reading!
Sidenote—love your work and WiP (I’m also part of the PS community). Hope to see you on the EAF again!
Oh, I remember reading this paper now! It’s great, thanks for sharing.
And thank you very much :) I will be here more often for sure.