Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths

• Prove causality

• Treatment/intervention assignment/administration in a precise and controlled way

• Precisely choose measurement for observation

• Randomization reduces bias (e.g. blinded so that participants and doctors, nurses or researchers do not know what treatment each participant is receiving)

• Tool to examine cause-effect relationships between an intervention and outcome. This is because the act of randomization balances participant characteristics.

Weaknesses

• High cost

• Time consuming

• Issues with generalizability (e.g. volunteers might not be representative of the population being studied)

• Logistically challenging (e.g. loss to follow up, supervision of multiple locations)