In News
- Economist and Nobel laureate Michael R Kremer has said that for a diverse country like India Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) must be carried out at multiple sites for better analysis and to see differences across states.
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- RCT was heavily discussed after Kremer and fellow economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo won the 2019 Nobel Prize winner in Economics.
- They had made the use of RCT for their research on poverty.
What are Randomised Controlled Trials(RCT) ?
- About:
- It is an experimental form of impact evaluation in which the population receiving the programme or policy intervention is chosen at random from the eligible population, and a control group is also chosen at random from the same eligible population.
- It tests the extent to which specific, planned impacts are being achieved.
- It involves dividing a population into smaller groups, in order to comparatively see the outcomes of an external stimulus.
- For example, if the aim of a study is to understand whether a free grains distribution scheme helped improve the nutrition levels among people living in a district, researchers will first create two groups within the population, and then put people into those groups randomly.
- One group (called the control group) does not receive the grains or the external stimulus, while the other group (treatment group) does. After a designated period of time, details of how both the groups are doing would be collected.
- Significance:
- It helps to focus on more day-to-day answers to problems of poverty and deprivation, such as delivery of basic amenities
- Criticism:
- Critics said that randomisation does not equalise two groups”, and warned against over-reliance on RCTs to frame policies.
- There may be more women in one group, or one group may have more people having some kind of distinctiveness that affects the result. As a result, the outcomes may not give an accurate view, and the very use of a scientific experiment tool in social sciences was questioned.
- RCT has also been criticised for reducing the study of poverty to small interventions unconnected to the lived experiences of the poor.
Source:IE
