Many policy interventions intended to benefit public health can only be evaluated as so-called natural experiments, because implementation is not controlled by researchers seeking to assess effectiveness. Such assessments can be complicated by non-comparability between people affected and not affected by the intervention. Various quasi-experimental designs have been proposed to address this problem of non-comparability, one being the regression discontinuity design, which has had little use in public health. This design has application when treatment assignment depends on the value of a variable—referred to as the assignment variable—reaching a threshold.
Original Source [2]
Links:
[1] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/feature-article/do-air-quality-alerts-benefit-public-health-new-evidence-canada
[2] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(17)30184-5/fulltext
[3] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/author/jonathan-m-samet-0
[4] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/journal/lancet
[5] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/thesaurus/air-pollution
[6] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/thesaurus/air-quality-and-health
[7] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/thesaurus/canada