Failing in the Field

All across the social sciences, from development economics to political science departments, researchers are going into the field to collect data and learn about the world. While much has been gained from the successes of randomized controlled trials, stories of failed projects often do not get told. In Failing in the Field, Dean Karlan and Jacob A

“"When we read about a successful program that mitigates poverty or improves health, we seldom consider how much work went into its evaluation and how many ways the process could go wrong. Drawing on their own and others' extensive experience in the field, Karlan and Appel provide vivid examples of failure to help future evaluators avoid common pitfalls." --Paul Brest, Stanford Law School”

"Highly recommended."--Karen Shook, Times Higher Education

Dean Karlan is professor of economics at Yale University and president of Innovations for Poverty Action. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jacob Appel previously worked with Innovations for Poverty Action, and is currently pursuing his MPA at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Karlan and Appel are the coauthors of More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics Is Helping to Solve Global Poverty.

"When we read about a successful program that mitigates poverty or improves health, we seldom consider how much work went into its evaluation and how many ways the process could go wrong. Drawing on their own and others' extensive experience in the field, Karlan and Appel provide vivid examples of failure to help future evaluators avoid common pitfalls." --Paul Brest, Stanford Law School "This unusual and refreshing book is a good complement to the existing literature on impact evaluation and documents the practical issues involved in implementing randomized control trials. The authors look at real examples of what goes wrong in the field and provide a nice framework for thinking about how to avoid failures." --Rachel Glennerster, coauthor of Running Randomized Evaluations "Using a rich set of examples, Failing in the Field describes failures that occur because the design or implementation of a research study does not yield data that can answer the questions it was intended to. By showing that mistakes in research design can be systematic, this book could benefit many students before they embark on their own studies. It was a pleasure to read." --Karla Hoff, World Bank

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