Randomized Controlled Trials: Challenges to the 'Gold Standard'

While in the legal domain such research design issues typically involve law and psychology papers, the "conventional wisdom" dwells on standard external validity challenges. As Andrew Gelman's (Columbia--Statistics) post makes clear, however, other challenges also lurk. That is to say, while a randomization strategy is invariably preferred, it cannot alone eliminate all research design concerns. As Gelman helpfully notes, "there’s more to inference than unbiasedness."