A dark art comes to the water-cooler: A review of some key texts on RCTs for children's services professionals and researchers

Journal of Children's Services

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 40-50

  Hobbs, Tim ^a   Carr, Matthew ^b   Holley, Marc ^b   Gray, Nathan ^b   Axford, Nick ^a  

^a Dartington Service Design Lab   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS   (United States)

Author keywords

Children's services; Evaluation; Randomisation; RCT; Social experiment

Indexed keywords

EID: 84934296081     PISSN: 17466660     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1108/17466660200800005     Document Type: Review

References (11)

1. Rutter M (2006) Is Sure Start an effective preventive intervention? Child and Adolescent Mental Health 11 135-141.
2. Little M and Abunimah A (2007) Improving outcomes for children in the island of Ireland: the role of philanthropic investment. Journal of Children's Services 2 (2) 60-67; Keenan O (2007) The evolution of children's services in Ireland, and prospects for the future: a personal perspective. Journal of Children's Services 2 (4) 71-80.
3. See, for example, Blueprints for Violence Prevention www.colorado.edu/cspv/blueprints and Promising Practices Network on Children, Families and Communities www.promisingpractices.net
4. Petrosino A, Turpin-Petrosino C and Buehler J (2002) ‘Scared Straight’ and other juvenile awareness programmes for preventing juvenile delinquency. www.campbellcollaboration.org/doc-pdf/ssr.pdf
5. The QUOROM (Quality Of Reporting Meta-analyses) statement was developed to help to improve the quality of reporting of meta-analyses in healthcare research. Moher D, Cook DJ, Eastwood S, Olkin I, Rennie D & Stroup DF (1999) Improving the quality of reports of meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials: the QUOROM statement. Lancet 354 1896-1900.
6. AMSTAR is a quality appraisal tool for assessing the quality of systematic reviews. Shea BJ, Grimshaw JM, Wells GA, Boers M, Andersson N, Hamel C, Porter AC, Tugwell P, Moher D & Bouter LM (2007) Development of AMSTAR: a measurement tool to assess the methodological quality of systematic reviews. BMC Medical Research Technology 7 (10).
7. Through its systematic reviews and annual colloquiums, the Campbell Collaboration strives to make high-quality evidence of ‘what works’ in education, social welfare and criminal justice available to service providers, policy-makers, educators, students, professional researchers and the general public. www.campbellcollaboration.org
8. The Cochrane Collaboration seeks to improve healthcare decision-making globally through systematic reviews of the effects of healthcare interventions. www.cochrane.org
9. For example: Barlow J, Simkiss D & Stewart-Brown S (2006) Interventions to prevent or ameliorate child physical abuse and neglect: findings from a systematic review of reviews. Journal of Children's Services 1 (3) 6-28; Gould N & Richardson J (2006) Parent-training/education programmes in the management of children with conduct disorders: developing an integrated evidence-based perspective for health and social care. Journal of Children's Services 1 (4) 47-60.
10. ANOVA is a test of the statistical significance of the differences among the mean scores of two or more groups on one or more variables. As such it is particularly useful for measuring the difference between outcomes for a programme group and a control group in an RCT.
11. Propensity score matching is a statistical technique that can be used in non-experimental studies to strengthen the conclusions that can be drawn about causal inference.