ArticleCurrent epidemiology reports2016
The Consistency Assumption for Causal Inference in Social Epidemiology: When a Rose is Not a Rose.
Article in Current epidemiology reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 78 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
78 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Gentrification, Neighborhood Change, and Population Health: a Systematic Review.Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine · 2020Pooled it
- "Clear action requires clear thinking": A systematic review of gentrification and health research in the United States.Health & place · 2019Pooled it
- WASH interventions and child diarrhea at the interface of climate and socioeconomic position in Bangladesh.Nature communications · 2024Trial
- Organisational interventions in nursing care: A scoping review and descriptive system to support comparison.International journal of nursing studies advances · 2026Article
- Seasonally Varying Effects of Improved Water, Sanitation, and Handwashing Interventions onOpen forum infectious diseases · 2026Article
- A Novel Decision-Modeling Framework for Health Policy Analyses When Outcomes Are Influenced by Social and Disease Processes.Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making · 2026Article
- COVID-19 related brain MRI changes and anticipated long-term dementia risk: A front-door-criterion-inspired approach.Annals of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Health-related quality of life trajectories and loss of independence among community-dwelling older adults.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Early mobilisation in the ICU: when one size no longer fits all.Intensive care medicine · 2026Article
- Is early childhood education associated with better midlife cognition, especially for children facing socioeconomic marginalization?PloS one · 2026Article
- Sensitivity Analysis of the Consistency Assumption.Observational studies · 2026Article
- Seasonally varying effects of improved water, sanitation and handwashing interventions on Giardia infection in Bangladesh.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Real-world evidence for primary care: A primer on observational research.African journal of primary health care & family medicine · 2025Article
- Management of intracranial hypertension with and without invasive intracranial pressure monitoring.World journal of critical care medicine · 2025Review
- Toward New Directions in Human Biology: A Roadmap for Anthropological Causal Inference With Observational Data.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Depicting patient-reported outcome measures within directed acyclic graphs: practice and implications for causal reasoning.Quality of life research : an international journal of quality of life aspects of treatment, care and rehabilitation · 2025Article
- Causal clarity in statistical software.International journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Sodium bicarbonate administration for metabolic acidosis in the intensive care unit: a target trial emulation.Intensive care medicine · 2025Article
- Methodological approaches to structural change: epidemiology and the case for reparations.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Poverty and Childhood Obesity: Current Evidence and Methodologies for Future Research.Current obesity reports · 2025Review
18 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The assumption that exposures as measured in observational settings have clear and specific definitions underpins epidemiologic research and allows us to use observational data to predict outcomes in interventions. This leap between exposures as measured and exposures as intervened upon is typically supported by the consistency assumption. The consistency assumption has received extensive attention in risk factor epidemiology but relatively little emphasis in social epidemiology. However, violations of the consistency assumption may be especially important to consider when understanding how social and economic exposures influence health. Efforts to clarify the definitions of our exposures, thus bolstering the consistency assumption, will help guide interventions to improve population health and reduce health disparities. This article focuses on the consistency assumption as considered within social epidemiology. We explain how this assumption is articulated in the causal inference literature and give examples of how it might be violated for three common exposure in social epidemiology research: income, education and neighborhood characteristics. We conclude that there is good reason to worry about consistency assumption violations in much of social epidemiology research. Theoretically motivated explorations of mechanisms along with empirical comparisons of research findings under alternative operationalizations of exposure can help identify consistency violations. We recommend that future social epidemiology studies be more explicit to name and discuss the consistency assumption when describing the exposure of interest, including reconciling disparate results in the literature.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.