An overview on field experiments in health in developing countries

Аннотация

Medical science recognizes that patients do not always respond to treatment in a way physicians expect; moreover, different people respond to treatment in different and sometimes unpredictable ways. These differences can be attributed to observable patients’ characteristics, such as age and gender, but also unobservable characteristics can influence the results, such as lifestyle or an unreported health condition. To overcome this problem, during the twentieth century, medical researchers and statisticians began extensively using randomized controlled trial (RCT) methods to assess the effect of the treatment and to separate this effect from other patients’ characteristics that could affect the results. During the last decades, social scientists, willing to go beyond correlational analysis to provide insights on causation, have adopted a similar approach. This paper gives a short overview of RCT in development economics with a special attention to programs related to health in developing countries.