Medicine: Mind the Gap is a lecture series that explores issues at the intersection of research, evidence, and clinical practice—areas in which conventional wisdom may be contradicted by recent evidence. From the role of advocacy organizations in medical research and policy, to off-label drug use, to the effectiveness of continuing medical education, the seminar series will aim to engage the National Institutes of Health community in thought-provoking discussions to challenge what we think we know and to think critically about our role in today’s research environment.

Recent years have seen important advances in the design and analysis of both randomized experiments and quasi-experiments. In particular, research has focused on empirical tests of the conditions under which nonrandomized experiments can approximate answers from a randomized experiment. Such efforts have a long history in fields such as medicine (Gilbert, McPeek, and Mosteller, 1977), psychology (Smith and Glass, 1978), and economics (LaLonde, 1986). Recent work is prompted by evidence-based practice and theoretical advances such as Rubin's causal model.

This webinar will review illustrative studies that demonstrate the direction such work is taking and the results that seem to be emerging in regard to nonrandomized control group designs, regression discontinuity designs, and interrupted time series designs.

William R. Shadish is Distinguished Professor and Founding Faculty, University of California, Merced. He received his B.S. in sociology from Santa Clara University in 1972, and his M.S. (1975) and Ph.D. (1978) from Purdue University in clinical psychology, with minors in statistics and measurement. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in methodology and program evaluation at Northwestern University from 1978 to 1981.

For more information go to http://prevention.nih.gov/mindthegap/shadish.aspx