What’s on trial? The making of field experiments in international development

In the last 20 years, the drive for evidence‐based policymaking has been coupled with a concurrent push for the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the “gold‐standard” for generating rigorous evidence on whether or not development interventions work. Drawing on content analysis of 63 development RCTs and 4 years of participant observation, I provide a rich description of the diverse set of actors and the transnational organizational effort required to implement development RCTs and maintain their “scientific status.” Particularly, I investigate the boundary work that proponents of RCTs—also known as randomistas—do to differentiate the purposes and merits of testing development projects from doing them, as a way to bypass the political and ethical problems presented by adopting the experimental method with foreign aid beneficiaries in poor countries. Although randomistas have been mostly successful in differentiating RCTs from the projects evaluated, I also examine cases where they were not able to do so, as a means to highlight the controversies associated with implementing RCTs in international development.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154964/1/bjos12723_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154964/2/bjos12723.pd

Association of surfactant protein A polymorphisms with otitis media in infants at risk for asthma

BACKGROUND: Otitis media is one of the most common infections of early childhood. Surfactant protein A functions as part of the innate immune response, which plays an important role in preventing infections early in life. This prospective study utilized a candidate gene approach to evaluate the association between polymorphisms in loci encoding SP-A and risk of otitis media during the first year of life among a cohort of infants at risk for developing asthma. METHODS: Between September 1996 and December 1998, women were invited to participate if they had at least one other child with physician-diagnosed asthma. Each mother was given a standardized questionnaire within 4 months of her infant's birth. Infant respiratory symptoms were collected during quarterly telephone interviews at 6, 9 and 12 months of age. Genotyping was done on 355 infants for whom whole blood and complete otitis media data were available. RESULTS: Polymorphisms at codons 19, 62, and 133 in SP-A1, and 223 in SP-A2 were associated with race/ethnicity. In logistic regression models incorporating estimates of uncertainty in haplotype assignment, the 6A(4)/1A(5)haplotype was protective for otitis media among white infants in our study population (OR 0.23; 95% CI 0.07,0.73). CONCLUSION: These results indicate that polymorphisms within SP-A loci may be associated with otitis media in white infants. Larger confirmatory studies in all ethnic groups are warranted