Merits and Shortcomings of RCT as a Study Design

Merits and Shortcomings of RCT as a Study Design
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Merits and Shortcomings of RCT as a Study Design
The Randomized Clinical Trial (RCT) refers to an experimental clinical study on patients that have given their consent to be used as a research sample (Jason, & Reed, 2015). Researchers seek to control patients' exposure to mainly known confounders during RCT in time, duration, and amount. Most importantly, the researchers expose particular patients, among the sampling population, to specific confounders. Therefore, it means that not every patient is eligible for exposure to any time of confounder. This paper justifies the proposition that RCT, as a research design, has both merits and shortcomings.
Internal Validity
The RCT is beneficial in that it facilitates the high internal validity of clinical research. The validity of RCT is realized when the differences between groups of participants relate to the intervention used in the research trial. For example, a particular study group's reduced mortality rate results from intervention used but not specific factors such as sex, co-medication, or age (Martin, 2013, November 3). Usually, the degree of internal validity depends on the appropriateness of the adopted design, reporting, and conduction of any RCT study. However, not all RCTs attain a high level of validity. Sometimes, researchers may embrace biasness at different trial levels or make a random error that affects the trial results. It suffices to hold that wrong results read to the wrong conclusion; hence, lack of internal validity of the entire RCT study.
Biasness, a systematic error caused by flaws in the conduction, design, and or reporting of CRT trials, leads to wrong results (Martin, 2013, October 28). Biasness result from flaws in data collection and statistical analysis of the data. There are, however, four types of biasness that may be experienced during RCTs. They include performance bias, selection bias, attrition bias, and detection bias.
RCT studies that do not involve any biasness in data collection and analysis attain a high level of internal validity. Randomization plays a considerable role in reducing biasness. For instance, randomization ensures there is no selection bias when all individual participants have an equal probability of receiving an assignment to primary or control treatment. During the assignment, allocation concealment helps to ensure that an individual is assigned to only one assignment and not the other. The strategy also separates people that recruit participants from those that assign the selected individuals. It prevents performance bias where a participant or investigator violates study protocol.
Lastly, internal validity is increased when detection bias is reduced. Usually, detection bias occurs when subjects or the assessor and the assessed individual have a close relationship. Notably, performance bias leads to detection bias, which emanates from the individual perception of benefits and demerits of the investigational treatment. Blinding randomization reduces performance and detection bias in measurement. Therefore, it means a high degree of accuracy in the measurem...