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The Ten Things we Always Wanted to Know about Randomised Controlled Trials but were Afraid to Ask

Jacques Lelorier*, Mohamad Issa

Randomized Controlled Trials are increasingly popular in the social sciences, not only in medicine. We argue that
the lay public, and sometimes researchers, put too much trust in randomized controlled trials over other methods of
investigation. Contrary to frequent claims in the applied literature, randomization does not equalize everything other
than the treatment in the treatment and control groups, it does not automatically deliver a precise estimate of the
average treatment effect, and it does not relieve us of the need to think about (observed or unobserved) covariates.
Finding out whether an estimate was generated by chance is more difficult than commonly believed.