Introducing New Contraceptives in Rural China: A Field Experiment

Abstract

The project on Introducing New Contraceptives in Rural China (INCRC) was carried out between 1991 and 1996 in four counties of rural north China. The experimental component involved the random assignment of a multipronged treatment to four townships in each county. Two townships per county served as controls. The scale of the project made it nearly impossible to maintain the integrity of the experimental model that was at the core of the project's design. In spite of the massive numbers of people in the catchment areas of the study (>100,000), the experimental design was of low power, with but eight controls on sixteen treatments; when random assignment is at higher levels of analysis, masses of individual observations only create greater precision in the estimation of higher-order observations. However, the study would not have been conducted, and valuable observations would not have been made, were it not conceived as an experiment.

Causal Inference in Sociological Research

“…An obvious response to potential violations of SUTVA is to move the analysis to a more aggregate level, i.e., a classroom, family, organization, or local labor market, at which SUTVA can more plausibly be maintained and estimate macro treatment effects at that level (e.g., Moffitt 2005, Morgan & Winship 2007, Smith 2003. Empirically, this corresponds to sociologists' interests in group-level rather than individuallevel interventions (see Axinn & Barber 2001;Smith 2005;Hong & Raudenbush 2006Sampson 2008), and on a larger scale this is also consistent with Coleman's (1990) theoretical position of sociology as the study of social systems. However, the more inconvenient implication is that actual generative mechanisms will be left unspecified in the analysis, and, to the extent that they are built on social interactions, cannot readily be addressed in the standard statistical framework.…”

Effects of Causes and Causes of Effects

“…I was long ago attracted to the power of the potential outcomes model for clarifying problems in sociology, especially with respect to understanding the EoC (Smith 1990). This led me in the direction, in sociology and related fields, of thinking about meaningful causes as operating at a higher level of analysis and intervention than the unit level at which most measurement obtains (Smith 2003(Smith , 2005(Smith , 2009(Smith , 2013a(Smith , 2013b. I thus have no problem with the idea that a ''strong corporate culture'' (Dawid, Faigman, and Fienberg 2014:380) might have a demonstrable effect on the wages of women, relative to what they might expect in the presence of an alternative workforce organization.…”