Randomized Controlled Trials

The aim of establishing an evidence-based practice—in health care, psychology, or any other field—is to make clinical work, and the implementation of interventions, more scientific and empirically grounded. If this goal is achieved, care will be safer, more effective, and more consistent. Good research helps ensure that interventions are backed by evidence of sufficient quality to justify investment in implementing them, and later, scaling them up to benefit more people. Moreover, if policy makers propose to invest in an intervention (such as make a medication, a parenting program, or a school-feeding scheme available), then one of the central questions that they should ask is whether or not that intervention works. Does it achieve the outcomes that are expected of it, so that it will be ...