TY  - UNPB
ID  - pittir38464
UR  - http://d-scholarship-dev.library.pitt.edu/38464/
A1  - Lederer, Lisa
Y1  - 2020/07/30/
N2  - According to its stated core values, the American Public Health Association (APHA) is committed to policies and practices based on ?evidence that demonstrates effectiveness.? The meaning of this phrase, however, leaves much room for debate, and this paper?s Public Health significance lies in its contribution to such a debate. Elaborating on its assertion about evidence, the APHA warns researchers ?not to take statistics at face value.? Accordingly, Public Health researchers have adopted a range of approaches for bolstering the statistical outputs of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) -- though these results are frequently seen as the ?gold standard? of medical and policy evidence. Not all of the approaches are equal, however, in their ability to integrate statistical results into actionable conclusions. This paper, after tracing the origins of the outsized prominence of RCT results in Public Health -- despite the APHA?s warning -- and locating the central weakness of these results to their limited portability between settings, evaluates the approaches that have been proposed thus far. Surveying different disciplinary perspectives shows that, while many researchers have attempted to isolate and investigate the context of Public Health interventions, truly bolstering RCT results requires researching the operations of the interventions themselves. The optimal approach, it is concluded, demands creating a multi-level definition in which mechanisms are outlined at each level, including that of the participant.
KW  - complex interventions
KW  -  RCT
KW  -  implementation science
KW  -  core components
TI  - Reinforcing RCTs of Public Health Interventions: Defining and Linking Form and Function
EP  - 39
AV  - public
ER  -