قارن الطرق

	التجربة الطبيعية التجريبية	التجربة العشوائية المنضبطة الاستكشافية
المجال	التصميم التجريبي	التصميم التجريبي
العائلة	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
سنة النشأة	2000s–2010s (as formalized practice)	1990s–2000s (methodological formalization)
صاحب الطريقة	Combination of natural experiment tradition (Dunning, Angrist, Pischke) and pilot study methodology	Formalized through clinical trials methodology community
النوع	Quasi-experimental feasibility design	Experimental feasibility design
المصدر التأسيسي	Dunning, T. (2012). Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-Based Approach. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9781107017412	Thabane, L., Ma, J., Chu, R., Cheng, J., Ismaila, A., Rios, L. P., ... & Goldsmith, C. H. (2010). A tutorial on pilot studies: the what, why and how. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 10(1), 1.
الأسماء البديلة	feasibility natural experiment, preliminary natural experiment, pilot quasi-experiment, exploratory natural experiment	pilot RCT, feasibility RCT, pilot trial, preliminary RCT
ذات صلة	4	5
الملخص	A pilot natural experiment is a small-scale preliminary study that exploits an existing exogenous event or policy variation to test whether a full natural experiment is viable. It preserves the core logic of natural experiments — using real-world discontinuities to approximate causal inference — while explicitly scoping the work to assess data availability, group comparability, effect detectability, and procedural feasibility before committing resources to a larger study.	A pilot randomized controlled trial (pilot RCT) is a small-scale, fully randomized experiment conducted before a definitive RCT to test the feasibility of study procedures, estimate key parameters such as recruitment rates and effect-size variability, and identify practical barriers. It uses the same randomization, intervention, and measurement protocol as the planned full trial but on a fraction of the target sample. The goal is not to confirm efficacy but to refine and justify the main trial design.