DeclareDesign Blog
Get me a random assignment YESTERDAY 2018/12/04

You’re partnering with an education nonprofit and you are planning on running a randomized control trial in 80 classrooms spread across 20 community schools. The request is in: please send us a spreadsheet with random assignments. The assignment’s gotta be blocked by school, it’s gotta be reproducible, and it’s gotta be tonight. The good news is that you can do all this in a couple of lines of code. We show how using some DeclareDesign tools and then walk through handling of more complex cases.

Randomization does not justify t-tests. How worried should I be? 2018/11/27

Deaton and Cartwright (2017) provide multiple arguments against claims that randomized trials should be thought of as a kind of gold standard of scientific evidence. One striking argument they make is that randomization does not justify the statistical tests that researchers typically use. They are right in that. Even if researchers can claim that their estimates of uncertainty are justified by randomization, their habitual use of those estimates to conduct t-tests are not. To get a handle on how severe the problem is we replicate the results in Deaton and Cartwright (2017) and then use a wider set of diagnosands to probe more deeply. Our investigation suggests that what at first seems like a big problem might not in fact be so great if your hypotheses are what they often are for experimentalists—sharp and sample-focused.

Instead of avoiding spillovers, you can model them 2018/11/20

Spillovers are often seen as a nuisance that lead researchers into error when estimating effects of interest. In a previous post, we discussed sampling strategies to reduce these risks. A more substantively satisfying approach is to try to study spillovers directly. If we do it right we can remove errors in our estimation of primary quantities of interest and learn about how spillovers work at the same time.

The humble $$p$$-value is much maligned and terribly misunderstood. The problem is that everyone wants to know the answer to the question: “what is the probability that [hypothesis] is true?” But $$p$$ answers a different (and not terribly useful) question: “how (un)surprising is this evidence given [hypothesis]?” Can $$p$$ shed insight on the question we really care about? Maybe, though there are dangers.