Friday, January 22, 2016

Counterfactual, clone, match and other similar terms

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited by the ASEAN Training Center on Preventive Drug Education to train them on Impact Evaluation as I was informed that the trend on this area is the use of randomized control trial (RCT) as the gold standard for evaluation design.  I went beyond that as I found myself talking also about various quasi-experimental methods as these suffices in the event that RCT is not viable or feasible design.

I started my talk with the concept of counterfactual as this is an indispensable element of impact estimation.  Because the audience was relatively new to monitoring and evaluation, I use layman's terms so that the notion of counterfactual is understood.  Among the words close to the sense of counterfactual are the following:

Control Group
Non-beneficiary
What if situation
Status Quo
Clone
Twin
Match
Equivalent
Nearest Neighbor
Comparison Group
Similar
Identical
Look-alike

Can you think of other words for counterfactual?

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