Randomisation and chance-based designs in social care research

Authors:
WOODS Bob, RUSSELL Ian
Publisher:
NIHR School for Social Care Research
Publication year:
2014
Pagination:
vi, 29
Place of publication:
London

Discusses the effectiveness of chance-based designs (CBDs) in social care research. CBDs allocate participants between interventions at random, thus maximising internal validity. While ‘randomised trials’, as they are called in medicine, are regarded as the ‘gold standard’ of healthcare research and have become the dominant research design in interventions research and in developing ‘evidence-based medicine’ and practice, they are less widely used in social care research in the UK and are generally viewed with suspicion, especially by critics who equate them with drug trials. The paper argues that pragmatic CBDs, i.e., designs which simply attempt to estimate in normal practice whether the benefits of new approaches, typically more complex interventions, outweigh their costs have enhanced research on complex interventions in health care, notably at the interface with social care. The paper also discusses the ethical implications of denying ‘control’ participants access to the new intervention, emphasising the value of resorting to the naturalistic rigour of a pragmatic CBD to inform the best use of scarce resources and recommending that all participants receive at least current ‘best practice’. (Edited publisher abstract)

Subject terms:
research methods, evidence-based practice, randomised controlled trials, social care, intervention, cost effectiveness, evaluation;
Content type:
research
Link:
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Series name:
Methods Review
Series no:
17

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