The Entry of Randomized Assignment into the Social Sciences
Jamison, JC
Date: 22 March 2019
Journal
Journal of Causal Inference
Publisher
De Gruyter
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Although the concept of randomized assignment in order to control for extraneous confounding
factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of
homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century there was a growing awareness of the need for
comparison groups, albeit often without ...
Although the concept of randomized assignment in order to control for extraneous confounding
factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of
homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century there was a growing awareness of the need for
comparison groups, albeit often without the realization that randomization could be a clean method to
achieve that goal. In the second and more crucial phase of this history, four separate but related
disciplines introduced randomized control trials within a few years of one another in the 1920s:
agricultural science; clinical medicine; educational psychology; and social policy (specifically political
science). This brought more rigor to fields that were focusing more on causal relationships. In a third
phase, the 1950s through 1970s saw a surge of interest in more applied randomized experiments in
economics and elsewhere – both in the lab and especially in the field.
Economics
Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy
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