השוואת שיטות

	ניסוי מרובה זרועות	ניסוי מבוקר אקראי באשכולות
תחום	תכנון ניסויים	תכנון ניסויים
משפחה	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
שנת המקור	1990s–2000s (clinical formalization); multi-arm concept implicit in ANOVA-era factorial designs	1978–1980s
הוגה השיטה	Developed within clinical trials methodology; formalized by Parmar, Royston and colleagues (UK MRC CTU, early 2000s)	Cornfield (1978); systematised by Donner and colleagues (1980s)
סוג	Experimental design	Experimental design
מקור מכונן	Royston, P., Parmar, M. K. B., & Qian, W. (2003). Novel designs for multi-arm clinical trials with survival outcomes with an application in ovarian cancer. Statistics in Medicine, 22(14), 2239–2256.	Donner, A., & Klar, N. (2000). Design and Analysis of Cluster Randomization Trials in Health Research. Arnold. ISBN: 978-0340652978
כינויים	multi-arm trial, multiple-arm experiment, multi-group experiment, many-arm design	cluster RCT, group-randomized trial, community randomized trial, cluster-randomized experiment
קשורות	5	4
תקציר	A multi-arm experiment simultaneously compares three or more treatment or intervention conditions — each called an arm — against a shared control or against one another. By testing multiple alternatives in a single study, it yields more information per participant than running separate two-group experiments sequentially, while controlling the overall Type I error rate through pre-specified comparison strategies.	A cluster randomized controlled trial (cluster RCT) is an experimental design in which intact social or organisational groups — such as schools, clinics, villages, or workplaces — are randomly assigned to treatment conditions rather than individual participants. Outcomes are still measured at the individual level, but the unit of randomization is the cluster. This design is essential when an intervention is delivered to whole groups, when there is a risk of contamination between participants in the same setting, or when individual randomization is logistically or ethically impractical.