School of Statistics, University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
Department of Statistics of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Biometrics. 2022 Jun;78(2):668-678. doi: 10.1111/biom.13483. Epub 2021 May 31.
A prominent threat to causal inference about peer effects in social science studies is the presence of homophily bias , that is, social influence between friends and families is entangled with common characteristics or underlying similarities that form close connections. Analysis of social study data has suggested that certain health conditions such as obesity and psychological states including happiness and loneliness can spread between friends and relatives. However, such analyses of peer effects or contagion effects have come under criticism because homophily bias may compromise the causal statement. We develop a regression-based approach which leverages a negative control exposure for identification and estimation of contagion effects on additive or multiplicative scales, in the presence of homophily bias. We apply our methods to evaluate the peer effect of obesity in Framingham Offspring Study.
同群效应在社会科学研究中的因果推断面临一个突出的威胁，即同群偏见（homophily bias），也就是说朋友和家庭之间的社会影响与形成紧密联系的共同特征或潜在相似性纠缠在一起。对社会研究数据的分析表明，某些健康状况，如肥胖，以及包括幸福和孤独在内的心理状态，可以在朋友和亲戚之间传播。然而，由于同群偏见可能会影响因果关系的陈述，因此对同伴效应或传染效应的这种分析受到了批评。我们开发了一种基于回归的方法，该方法利用负控制暴露来识别和估计在同群偏见存在的情况下，在加性或乘法尺度上的传染效应。我们应用我们的方法来评估弗雷明汉后代研究中肥胖的同伴效应。
