DeclareDesign Blog
Sometimes blocking can reduce your precision 2018/09/24

You can often improve the precision of your randomized controlled trial with blocking: first gather similar units together into groups, then run experiments inside each little group, then average results across experiments. Block random assignment (sometimes called stratified random assignment) can be great—increasing precision with blocking is like getting extra sample size for free. Blocking works because it’s like controlling for a pre-treatment covariate in the “Data Strategy” rather than in the “Answer Strategy.” But sometimes it does more harm than good.

You can’t speak meaningfully about spillovers without specifying an estimand 2018/09/18

A dangerous fact: it is quite possible to talk in a seemingly coherent way about strategies to answer a research question without ever properly specifying what the research question is. The risk is that you end up with the right solution to the wrong problem. The problem is particularly acute for studies where there are risks of “spillovers.”

Consider an observational study looking at the effect of a non-randomly assigned treatment, $$Z$$, on an outcome $$Y$$. Say you have a pretreatment covariate, $$X$$, that is correlated with both $$Z$$ and $$Y$$. Should you control for $$X$$ when you try to assess the effect of $$Z$$ on $$Y$$?
Welcome to the DeclareDesign blog! We have been working on developing the DeclareDesign family of software packages to let researchers easily generate research designs and assess their properties. Our plan over the next six months is to put up weekly blog posts showing off features of the packages or highlighting the kinds of things you can learn about research design using this approach.