Unintended Consequences of Field Experiments in Poverty Settings

Extant research has shown that field experiments may generate unintended consequences. Yet, our understanding of these and how to mitigate their impact remains nascent. In this study, we conduct a follow-up fieldwork and qualitative investigation of a large-scale randomized controlled field experiment in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our empirical results suggest that the field experiments realized two unintended sub-treatments. We capture the subsequent unintended effects and their impact on the decision-making and actions of participants. We argue that unintended consequences provide an insight into the non-theorized dimension of field experiments that interact, often in unforeseeable ways, with the intended, theorized dimension of field experiments. We propose in situ and post hoc observational and interview data collections as a methodological innovation to pragmatically track and mitigate unintended consequences. We also propose a fully embedded case study design of field experiments to systematically build our understanding of how non-theorized and theorized dimensions of field experiments interact in shaping dependent variables.