Northeastern School of Criminology and Criminal Justice Professor Brandon Welsh recently published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Experimental Criminology.
Drawing on the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study (started in 1935) and famous experiments in medicine, Brandon Welsh and colleagues surveyed the evolution of pair-matching with random allocation in prospective controlled trials in criminology and medicine over almost 100 years. Welsh, Podolsky (Harvard Medical School), and Zane (Florida State University) also examined the advantages and disadvantages of the application of this novel and rigorous design and its implications for experimental criminology today. In this design, units (people or places) are matched by pairs on a wide array of covariates and units of each pair are randomly allocated to treatment and control conditions.
