Quantitative Reasoning

Design of Studies: Randomised

Assignment

The problem of assignment

Eligible children: those with parental consent.

Hard: using expertise to assign eligible children

to control and treatment groups with similar
polio risks.

Randomised assignment

An impartial procedure using chance, like

random draws without replacement.

With large number of subjects, it is very likely

that the two groups are similar in all aspects.

Randomised assignment demonstration

Random is not haphazard

Random has strict meaning, different from

informal usage.

If tickets are not mixed thoroughly, the draws

are not random.

Randomised Controlled Double-blind

Experiment

Placebo

Blinding subjects

Blinding doctors

Randomised Experiment Results

Size

Treatment
Control
No consent

200,000
200,000
350,000

Rate (per
100,000)
28
71
46

Rates Put Together

Randomised
Experiment
Treatment
28
Control
71
No consent
46

NFIP Study

Y2 with consent
Y1 and Y3
Y2 no consent

25
54
44

The skeptics hypothesis

Maybe the vaccine has no effect: some children

are fated to get polio. By pure luck, more of
these children were assigned to the control
group.

If this is correct, the chance of seeing the

difference or something more drastic is about
one in a billion. Skeptic is unlikely to be right.

Additional points

Randomised controlled double-blind experiment

also useful for comparing new treatment to old
treatment, instead of placebo.

Conclusion may not apply to ineligible subjects.

Ideas apply to other fields, like education.

Summary

With numerous eligible subjects, treatment and

control are likely similar.

Ideas behind randomised controlled double-blind

experiment useful for other kinds of problems.