If you are unable to attend class, please reply to all questions:
Multilevel modeling:
Diez-Roux article:
- Multi-level modeling approaches aim to analyze contextual effects beyond individual characteristics. Briefly describe the benefits of conducting a multilevel analysis for health disparities research areas.
- Draw from your own research or interest area to give an example of macro-level factors or group-level properties that influence individual health.
- Define the ecological and atomistic fallacies and explain how these fallacies differ from psychologistic and sociologistic fallacies.
Tomita article:
- The authors research stems from social disorganization theory which emphasizes the importance of one’s neighborhood and social place on their quality of health. In your own words summarize the author’s study rationale and main hypothesis.
- What are the various community, social and individual measures included in the analyses? In your opinion, what are the strengths of including these measures? What additional measures could have further strengthen the author’s analytic model?
- The authors included three interaction terms into the full model (model 2h). Describe the value of including these interaction terms in relationship to the author’s study objective. How would you interpret these interaction terms?
Causal Inference:
Kawachi article:
- Describe what reverse causation and omitted variable bias (“confounding”) are, and give examples of how these might be present in an area of health disparities research that you are interested in.
- In what ways does conducting a longitudinal study address reverse causation and confounding in a way that cross-sectional studies are unable to do?
- Why are experiments considered the strongest study design to allow for causal inference?
Beck article:
- DAGs, like the one presented in this article, are critical tools for researchers interested in drawing causal inferences from study findings. Draw a simple DAG relevant to an area of health disparities that you are interested in.
- How is the concept of race conceptualized differently in this study compared to other epidemiologic studies you have read where race is included as a predictor variable?
- The IPTW method described in this article is complex and it is beyond the scope of this course to expect a complete grasp on this analytical approach. However, in simple terms, what is this approach trying to accomplish?