Abstract
Evidence-based practice is well established as an expected professional approach to intervention in our health services. In medicine, the primary source of evidence is from largesample double-blind studies using randomised assignment to control and experimental groups. This approach is considered to be the ‘gold standard’ for evidential acceptability. Often, data from a number of studies are combined through meta-analysis, meaning that reviews of extensive research studies and the effect sizes of interventions are made accessible to health professionals through sites such as the Cochrane Collaboration, enhancing the ease with which evidence-based medicine can be practised. tutes ‘evidence’ between the different disciplines within the field. Given that RCG studies are often held up as the ‘gold standard’, there is a degree of superiority expressed amongst those who identify as belonging to what they deem to be the most methodologically rigorous approach. While there are undeniable benefits from RCG studies in some respects, their problematic characteristics are often not topics of discussion, although, historically, there has been debate over the costs and benefits of heavy reliance on the methodology. For example, in psychology, the role of chance as a variable,1 the paucity of direct replication1,2 and the distortions in the published record that can follow from editorial exclusion
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