Thanks Barry I tried to find this earlier but couldn’t.
I find these arguments rather uncompelling. What do you think Barry and Joel? (I wish I could tag people on this forum haha)
That they feel the need to write 4 paragraphs to defend against this elephant in the room says a lot. The question we are all still asking is how much better (if at all) StrongMinds really is than cash for wellbeing.
My first question is why don’t they reference the 2020 Haushofer study, the only RCT comparing psychotherapy to cash and showing cash is better? https://www.nber.org/papers/w28106
Second, their equipoise argument is very poor. The control arm should have been BRAC ELA club + cash. Then you keep 3 arms and avoid their straw man 4 arm problem. You would lose nothing in equipoise giving cash to the control arm—I don’t understand the equipoise argument perhaps I’m missing something?
Then third there’s this...
“Should the trial show that IPT-G+ is significantly more effective than IPT-G alone in reducing depression in the medium-run, our interpretation will be that there is a complementarity between the two interventions, and not that cash is effective on its own for sustained improvements in psychological wellbeing.”
This is the most telling paragraph. It’s like, we designed our study so that even if we see that cash gives a big boost, we aren’t going to consider the alternative that we don’t like. It seems to me like they are defending poor design post-hoc, rather than that they made good decision made in advance.
The more I see this, the more I suspect that leaving the cash arm out was either a big mistake or an intentional move by the NGOs. What we have now is a million dollar RCT, which doesn’t answer conclusively the most important question we are all asking. This leaves organisations like your HLI having to use substandard data to assess psychotherapy vs. cash because there is no direct gold standard comparison.
It’s pretty sad that a million dollars will be spent on a study that at best fails to address the elephant in the room (while spending 4 paragraphs explaining why they are not). Other than that the design and reasoning in this study seems fantastic.
Thanks Barry I tried to find this earlier but couldn’t.
I find these arguments rather uncompelling. What do you think Barry and Joel? (I wish I could tag people on this forum haha)
That they feel the need to write 4 paragraphs to defend against this elephant in the room says a lot. The question we are all still asking is how much better (if at all) StrongMinds really is than cash for wellbeing.
My first question is why don’t they reference the 2020 Haushofer study, the only RCT comparing psychotherapy to cash and showing cash is better? https://www.nber.org/papers/w28106
Second, their equipoise argument is very poor. The control arm should have been BRAC ELA club + cash. Then you keep 3 arms and avoid their straw man 4 arm problem. You would lose nothing in equipoise giving cash to the control arm—I don’t understand the equipoise argument perhaps I’m missing something?
Then third there’s this...
“Should the trial show that IPT-G+ is significantly more effective than IPT-G alone in reducing depression in the medium-run, our interpretation will be that there is a complementarity between the two interventions, and not that cash is effective on its own for sustained improvements in psychological wellbeing.”
This is the most telling paragraph. It’s like, we designed our study so that even if we see that cash gives a big boost, we aren’t going to consider the alternative that we don’t like. It seems to me like they are defending poor design post-hoc, rather than that they made good decision made in advance.
The more I see this, the more I suspect that leaving the cash arm out was either a big mistake or an intentional move by the NGOs. What we have now is a million dollar RCT, which doesn’t answer conclusively the most important question we are all asking. This leaves organisations like your HLI having to use substandard data to assess psychotherapy vs. cash because there is no direct gold standard comparison.
It’s pretty sad that a million dollars will be spent on a study that at best fails to address the elephant in the room (while spending 4 paragraphs explaining why they are not). Other than that the design and reasoning in this study seems fantastic.