16  Observational : causal – Research Design in the Social Sciences

Race as a Bundle of Sticks: Designs that Estimate Effects of Seemingly Immutable Characteristics

Although understanding the role of race, ethnicity, and identity is central to political science, methodological debates persist about whether it is possible to estimate the effect of something immutable. At the heart of the debate is an older theoretical question: Is race best understood under an essentialist or constructivist framework? In contrast to the “immutable characteristics” or essentialist approach, we argue that race should be operationalized as a “bundle of sticks” that can be disaggregated into elements. With elements of race, causal claims may be possible using two designs: (a) studies that measure the effect of exposure to a racial cue and (b) studies that exploit within-group variation to measure the effect of some manipulable element. These designs can reconcile scholarship on race and causation and offer a clear framework for future research.

Give Your Hypotheses Space! – Brian Lookabaugh

It’s tempting to throw a bunch of variables of interest into a model and evaluate each variable’s ‘impact’ on the outcome, but proceed at your own caution! Check this blog out to see why that approach is most likely not the best idea…

Shall we count the living or the dead?

In the 1958 paper "Shall we count the living or the dead?", Mindel C. Sheps proposed a principled solution to the familiar problem of asymmetry of the relative risk. We provide causal models to clarify the scope and limitations of Sheps' line of reasoning, and show that her preferred variant of the relative risk will be stable between patient groups under certain biologically interpretable conditions. Such stability is useful when findings from an intervention study must be generalized to support clinical decisions in patients whose risk profile differs from the participants in the study. We show that Sheps' approach is consistent with a substantial body of psychological and philosophical research on how human reasoners carry causal information from one context to another, and that it can be implemented in practice using van der Laan et al's Switch Relative Risk, or equivalently, using Baker and Jackson's Generalized Relative Risk Reduction (GRRR).

GitHub - NickCH-K/causaldata: Packages of Example Data for The Effect

Packages of Example Data for The Effect. Contribute to NickCH-K/causaldata development by creating an account on GitHub.

Correlation *is* causation!

- at least mathematically