It’s recognized that randomized controlled trials tend to find smaller effects than other evaluation methods. Now there’s the intriguing suggestion that the reporting of methodological quality in RCTs has an impact on trial outcomes.

This has been established in health but lately it’s been studied in criminal justice by Glyn Hallam and Amanda Perry from the University of York's Centre for Criminal Justice, Economics and Psychology. They assessed a series of trials against the CONSORT guidelines - an internationally recognized checklist of 22 items to be covered when reporting RCTs.

The York team analyzed 48 studies, coding them for how clearly they reported (1) the random allocation sequence, (2) whether the allocation sequence was concealed from those enrolling participants and (3) whether participants, researchers and providers were 'blind' as to which condition (treatment or control) participants were assigned to.

In contrast to findings in relation to clinical (health) research, they did not find significantly higher effect sizes in the less-clearly reported criminal justice