@article{a41f9a4875fe415aa082b873a66fc49d,
title = "Lessons from a field experiment involving involuntary subjects 3,000 miles away",
abstract = "Objectives: Describe the challenges involved in conducting field experiments that entail a long distance between the research team and the research site. Methods: A summary of the lessons learned from the field experiment of Hawaii's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE). Results: Pre-trial planning is especially important when the research team is a long distance from the research site. A good communication strategy helps educate practitioners on the merits of conservative design choices, such as intent-to-treat, and helps to signal the importance of the study and therefore of maintaining the condition assignments and delivering the intervention with fidelity. Conclusions: Distance creates additional challenges for the research team. These challenges make it even more essential to exploit assets at the research site. Distance creates more uncertainty, which makes pre-planning even more important, but it is expensive. Criminal-justice funding agencies' support for exploratory studies as precursors to full-blown trials would improve the quality of experimental criminal-justice research.",
keywords = "CONSORT, Field experiment, Involuntary subjects, Randomized controlled trial",
author = "Angela Hawken",
note = "Funding Information: Pre-planning should include a detailed evaluation of any databases needed to support the trial. Many criminal-justice studies rely on administrative databases for key outcomes variables. Mastering these databases during the planning phase will support more accurate budgeting for field staff and data extraction. Herein lies a challenge for criminal-justice research. Many of the failures described in this paper could have been avoided with better planning, and much of this planning needs to be done in advance of proposal writing. But many of us do not have discretionary budgets to support planning, which can be quite expensive, especially in the case of remote sites. Preparing institutional review board applications only adds to this burden. In an era of tight research funding, there is a tendency to wait for a proposal to be funded before submitting for IRB approval. There is often a great deal of daylight between a criminal-justice dataset “as described” and “as received.” Without IRB clearance, and access to these datasets, it is very hard to troubleshoot potential problems during the planning phase. Health researchers can move along their learning curves more quickly, with the National Institutes of Health{\textquoteright}s R21 Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award. Encouraging criminal-justice funding agencies to support exploratory studies as precursors to full-blown trials would improve the quality of experimental criminal-justice research.",
year = "2012",
month = sep,
doi = "10.1007/s11292-012-9156-x",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "8",
pages = "227--239",
journal = "Journal of Experimental Criminology",
issn = "1573-3750",
publisher = "Springer Netherlands",
number = "3",
}