Quasi-experimental study designs series—paper 2: complementary approaches to advancing global health knowledge

Quasi-experiments have been infrequently used in the health sciences. Focusing on health systems implementation research, this article details key advantages of quasi-experiments and argues that they can complement (but not replace) randomized evaluations. Specifically, it may be possible to use a q...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of clinical epidemiology Vol. 89; pp. 12 - 16
Main Authors: Geldsetzer, Pascal, Fawzi, Wafaie
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States Elsevier Inc 01.09.2017
Elsevier Limited
Subjects:
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome
Advantages
AIDS
Biomedical Research
Clinical trials
Design
Drug therapy
Epidemiology
Experiments
Global Health
Health care
Health systems research
HIV
Human immunodeficiency virus
Humans
Implementation science
Implementation trials
Initiatives
Intervention
Non-Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic - methods
Public health
Quasi-experiment
Quasi-experimental methods
Randomization
Randomized controlled trial
Research Design
Studies
Validity
Tanzania
Global health
Quasi-experiment
Health systems research
Implementation trials
Randomized controlled trial
Implementation science
ISSN:0895-4356, 1878-5921, 1878-5921
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Quasi-experiments have been infrequently used in the health sciences. Focusing on health systems implementation research, this article details key advantages of quasi-experiments and argues that they can complement (but not replace) randomized evaluations. Specifically, it may be possible to use a quasi-experiment to study the causal effect of an intervention that cannot feasibly be randomized or that would be unethical (e.g., because the intervention has become the standard of care) to test in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). In addition, because they usually take advantage of routinely collected data, quasi-experiments may be feasible when it is too costly (either financially or in terms of the required time) to carry out a RCT – an important advantage in research on health systems, which vary widely between settings. Nonetheless, we argue that RCTs will continue to be indispensable for implementation research because i) the assumptions needed to establish causality with a quasi-experiment are often unverifiable, ii) available data frequently do not allow for a rigorous quasi-experiment, and iii) randomized designs tend to lend themselves more to informing policy makers of causal effects prior to (or during) the full-scale rollout of an intervention than quasi-experiments.
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ISSN:0895-4356
1878-5921
1878-5921
DOI:10.1016/j.jclinepi.2017.03.015