IJE Advance Access originally published online on March 23, 2006
International Journal of Epidemiology 2006 35(3):643-647; doi:10.1093/ije/dyl054
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2006; all rights reserved.
Commentary |
Commentary: Advancing neighbourhood-effects research—selection, inferential support, and structural confounding
Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA. E-mail: oakes@epi.umn.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Everyone interested in how residential contexts independently shape health risks (i.e. neighbourhood effects) should study the new paper by Chaix, Rosvall, Lynch, and Merlo (herein after CRLM).1 This paper is one of the best to date on a topic fundamental to social epidemiology and related subdisciplines. I intend to include the paper in my doctoral-level seminars in social epidemiology and community trials and herewith encourage others to share it widely.
CRLM's paper is important because it is methodologically superior to most of the recent literature addressing the same phenomena. Distinguishing strengths include well-formed and clear a priori hypotheses, excellent exposure and outcome data permitting the assurance that study subjects actually resided in the areas of exposure, transparency of methodological choices, expressed interest in causal inference, fairly novel use of a shared-frailty model, simultaneous consideration of two factors, and most importantly, conservative conclusions.
Of course no study is perfect and while
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Critique |
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Problem 1—inferential support and structural confounding
Problem 1.1
Problem 1.2
Problem 2—selection and biased random effects (frailties)
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Conclusions |
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