Journey to the Heart Stone by Catherine Raphael

In fact, I became a committed experimentalist, and I dealt with the limitations of experiments by recognizing their restrictions and abiding by the principle “For determining causality, in many but not all circumstances, the randomized design is the worst form of design except all the others that have been tried 1” (Bickman and Reich 2014, pp. But I had to finish the paper, so I relegated these and similar questions to the list of universal imponderables such as why I exist. How could we complete all the randomized experiments needed? How many different outcomes should we measure? How could we learn to improve treatment? How should we consider individual differences in these group comparisons? I am sure I was not insightful enough to think of all these questions back then, but I know I felt frustrated and stymied by our methodological approach to answering these questions. Developing an effective treatment would take what seemed to me an incalculable number of randomized trials. It was clear that simply describing, let alone manipulating, the relevant characteristics of this one disorder and promising treatments would require hundreds of variables. Then, as now, the predominant research design was the randomized experiment or randomized clinical trial (RCT).

I was not very modest even as a first-year graduate student! But I was puzzled as to how to develop and evaluate a cure. In 1963, I was writing my first graduate paper at Columbia University on curing schizophrenia using Sarnoff Mednick’s learning theory.

Journey to the Heart Stone by Catherine Raphael