Trial reportEpidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.)2018
Composition or Context: Using Transportability to Understand Drivers of Site Differences in a Large-scale Housing Experiment.
Trial report in Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.), 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Systematic Review of Simulation Models to Track and Address the Opioid Crisis.Epidemiologic reviews · 2022Pooled it
- Effect of voucher receipt on perceived discrimination in boys and girls in the Moving to Opportunity study.American journal of epidemiology · 2026Trial
- Transporting the effect of the ASSIST school-based smoking prevention intervention to the Smoking, Drinking and Drug Use Among Young People in England Survey (2004-2021): A secondary analysis of a randomized controlled trial.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Trial
- Housing mobility protects against alcohol use for children with socioemotional health vulnerabilities: An experimental design.Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research · 2022Trial
- Helped into Harm: Mediation of a Housing Voucher Intervention on Mental Health and Substance Use in Boys.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2021Trial
- Association of Receipt of a Housing Voucher With Subsequent Hospital Utilization and Spending.JAMA · 2019Trial
- Baseline Characteristics Explain Differences in Effectiveness of Randomization to Daily Oral TDF/FTC PrEP Between Transgender Women and Cisgender Men Who Have Sex With Men in the iPrEx Trial.Journal of acquired immune deficiency syndromes (1999) · 2019Trial
- Mediation of Neighborhood Effects on Adolescent Substance Use by the School and Peer Environments.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2018Trial
- Article
- Center-specific causal inference with multicenter trials-Interpreting trial evidence in the context of each participating center.Statistical methods in medical research · 2025Article
- When, why and how are estimated effects transported between populations? A scoping review of studies applying transportability methods.European journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Bridging Differences in Cohort Analyses of the Relationship between Secondhand Smoke Exposure during Pregnancy and Birth Weight: The Transportability Framework in the ECHO Program.Environmental health perspectives · 2024Article
- Review
- Causal Inference Methods for Combining Randomized Trials and Observational Studies: A Review.Statistical science : a review journal of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics · 2024Article
- Population Neuroscience: Understanding Concepts of Generalizability and Transportability and Their Application to Improving the Public's Health.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2024Review
- The Price of Growing Up in a Low-Income Neighborhood: A Scoping Review of Associated Depressive Symptoms and Other Mood Disorders among Children and Adolescents.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Effects of Housing Vouchers on the Long-Term Exposure to Neighborhood Opportunity among Low-Income Families: The Moving to Opportunity Experiment.Housing studies · 2023Article
- Using the Moving To Opportunity Experiment to Investigate the Long-Term Impact of Neighborhoods on Healthcare Use by Specific Clinical Conditions and Type of Service.Housing policy debate · 2023Article
- Invited Commentary: Conducting and Emulating Trials to Study Effects of Social Interventions.American journal of epidemiology · 2022Article
- Efficiently transporting causal direct and indirect effects to new populations under intermediate confounding and with multiple mediators.Biostatistics (Oxford, England) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe Moving To Opportunity (MTO) experiment manipulated neighborhood context by randomly assigning housing vouchers to volunteers living in public housing to use to move to lower poverty neighborhoods in five US cities. This random assignment overcomes confounding limitations that challenge other neighborhood studies. However, differences in MTO's effects across the five cities have been largely ignored. Such differences could be due to population composition (e.g., differences in the racial/ethnic distribution) or to context (e.g., differences in the economy).
methodsUsing a nonparametric omnibus test and a multiply robust, semiparametric estimator for transportability, we assessed the extent to which differences in individual-level compositional characteristics that may act as effect modifiers can account for differences in MTO's effects across sites. We examined MTO's effects on marijuana use, behavioral problems, major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder among black and Latino adolescent males, where housing voucher receipt was harmful for health in some sites but beneficial in others.
resultsComparing point estimates, differences in composition partially explained site differences in MTO effects on marijuana use and behavioral problems but did not explain site differences for major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder.
conclusionsOur findings provide quantitative, rigorous evidence for the importance of context or unmeasured individual-level compositional variables in modifying MTO's effects.
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What OpenQuestion holds
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.