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Randomized field experiments are often logistical failures. They are particularly difficult to implement when the intervention involves a large number of components or service providers. Although surmountable, potential methodological problems with using randomized experiments to evaluate intervention programs under field (i.e., real world) conditions must be anticipated and resolved for the experiment to succeed. This article examines six potential major problems: treatment dilution, treatment contamination or confounding, inaccurate caseflow and power estimates, violations of the random assignment process, changes in the environmental context, and changes in the treatment regimens. It describes the general problem, several methodological developments related to them, and how the authors are attempting to deal with these problems in an experiment at the Research Triangle Institute. Developing designs and implementation strategies to deal with these six problems is crucial to extending the usefulness of randomized field experiments to evaluate social policies and experiments.

Although they are mandated reporters and work regularly with youth who have experienced abuse and trauma, many substance abuse treatment programs do not systematically screen for or address child maltreatment issues. This special issue provides a collection of articles that consistently demonstrate the feasibility of systematically screening for victimization among adolescents entering these programs and documents that multiple co-occurring types of victimization are actually the norm. Other articles in the section examine how levels of abuse and traumatic victimization are associated with aspects of adolescent substance use disorders, traumatic distress symptoms, co-occurring somatic and health problems, HIV risk behaviors, and a victim-to-abuser spiral. Finally, the articles address how this might affect treatment matching across levels of care. This introduction provides an overview of the articles and then highlights some of the key implications of this collective body of work for practice, policy, and future research.

AbstractMost evaluators of social programs have little training or experience in designing or conducting field experiments. The goal of this chapter is to describe strategies that could be used to improve the design, implementation, and analysis of randomized field experiments.

Increased use of randomized experiments to evaluate social programs throughout the world has been a major advance in evaluation research. This article focuses on determining which program evaluations are appropriate or feasible for randomized experiments. These threshold conditions include: (1) the present practice must need improvement; (2) the efficacy of the proposed intervention(s) must be uncertain; (3) there should be no simpler alternatives; (4) the results must be potentially important for policy; and (5) the design must meet the ethical standards of both the researchers and the service providers. To illustrate the issues involved and examine some of the innovative research designs for addressing them, experiments from Barbados, China, Colombia, Kenya, India, Israel, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Taiwan, and the U.S. are reviewed.

Using data from 1,162 people entering treatment and followed up (> 94%) for 8 years, this article examines the relationship between the duration of abstinence (1 month to 5 or more years) and other aspects of recovery (e.g., health, mental health, coping responses, legal involvement, vocational involvement, housing, peers, social and spiritual support), including the trend and at what point changes occur. It also examines how the duration of abstinence at a given point is related to the odds of sustaining abstinence in the subsequent year. The findings demonstrate the rich patterns of change associated with the course of long-term recovery.