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.
Our very first blog post is not here but over at the World Bank Development Impact blog. Big thanks to Berk Özler and colleagues for hosting us there and helping us to spread the word. The Development Impact post introduces the ideas behind design declaration and diagnosis.
Our first post here will use DeclareDesign to shed light on what has been a point of disagreement between researchers trying to figure out whether there are ever risks of bias arising from taking account of control variables – even “pretreatment” variables – when assessing effects in observational research.