Dana Smith
HS310-01 Unit 3 Assignment
Kaplan University

A randomized controlled study is one in which there are two groups, one treatment group and one control group. The treatment group receives the treatment under investigation, and the control group receives either no treatment or some standard default treatment. Patients are randomly assigned to all groups. Assigning patients at random reduces the risk of bias and increases the probability that differences between the groups can be attributed to the treatment, ("Randomized controlled studies," 2004).
Like anything in life a randomized control studies has its Advantages and Disadvantages. Some advantages include good randomization, this will “wash out” any population bias, it is easier to blind/mask than observational studies, results can be analyzed with well-known statistical tools and populations of participating individuals are clearly identified. Some disadvantages are that it can be expensive in terms of time and money, the population that participates may not be representative of the whole, and the study may not reveal causation, ("Randomized control trial," 2011). I am going to demonstrate how the study works by performing a RCFT, randomized controlled field test. A randomized controlled field trial is used to test preventive interventions in well persons in the community, (Jekel, 2007). My study will focus on a community based substance abuse prevention program for teens.

The goal is to see if the teens who are active participants of the program will be less likely to abuse drugs after being exposed to educational information. I predict that teens enrolled in a drug treatment program that follows a widely used care model should be more likely to curb their drug use and have better psychological health such as fewer symptoms of depression than their peers who have not received a prevention program focused on treating substance abuse.
Step one involves stating my hypothesis which I have already done by predicting that the teens involved in the program will have a lower rate of drug abuse, next I will need to randomly select the teens to participate, and then I will need to split them into two groups. Group 1 will be exposed to various types of information stressing the importance of staying drug free in the community. Group 2 will be the compare group of teens who are also from the community but these teens will not be exposed to all the anti-drug information as group one. The Last step will include measuring the outcome of the two groups after a period of time. This will complete my example of a randomized controlled trial.

References

Jekel (2007) Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Preventive Medicine 3rd edition Saunders/Elsevier Publishers
Randomized controlled studies. (2004, January 06). Retrieved from http://library.downstate.edu/EBM2/2200.htm
Randomized control trial. (2011, November). Retrieved from http://www.gwumc.edu/library/tutorials/studydesign101/rcts.html