ArticleAnnual review of sociology2014
Endogenous Selection Bias: The Problem of Conditioning on a Collider Variable.
Article in Annual review of sociology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 187 papers, 5 of them syntheses 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
187 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Observational studies of early versus late salvage therapies in critical care exhibit intrinsic selection bias: two meta-analyses.Critical care (London, England) · 2025Pooled it
- Maternal caffeine consumption during pregnancy and offspring cord blood DNA methylation: an epigenome-wide association study meta-analysis.Epigenomics · 2023Pooled it
- Particulate matter air pollution and COVID-19 infection, severity, and mortality: A systematic review and meta-analysis.The Science of the total environment · 2023Pooled it
- The health consequences of child marriage: a systematic review of the evidence.BMC public health · 2022Pooled it
- Improving sleep quality leads to better mental health: A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.Sleep medicine reviews · 2021Pooled it
- Evaluating the Let's Move It intervention programme theory for adolescents' physical activity: Theorized psychosocial mechanisms of behavioural changes.British journal of health psychology · 2025Trial
- Devaluation underlies gendered US faculty departures across disciplines and institutions.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Non-specific ECG ST-T abnormalities: cardiac repolarisation memory assessment.Heart (British Cardiac Society) · 2026Article
- Procedure time and 90-day outcomes after endovascular thrombectomy for large-core stroke.European stroke journal · 2026Observational
- Coordinated outcome-wide analytic methodology for multi-wave analyses of the global flourishing study.BMC global and public health · 2026Article
- Self-Reported Health Outcomes in Metabolic Health YouTube Comments: Cross-Sectional Study and Rule-Based Natural Language Processing Framework Development and Validation.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Observational
- Estimating the impact of out-of-home placement on health risk behavior in adolescents exposed to maltreatment: An advanced causal inference approach.Child abuse & neglect · 2026Article
- Causal machine learning uncovers conditions for convective intensification driven by organic and sulfate aerosols.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Growth mindset and socioeconomic inequality in academic achievement across seventy-three PISA countries.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Paraben exposures and satiety hormones in preschool children: an ENVIRONAGE study.Environmental research · 2025Article
- The causal effect of parent occupation on child occupation: A multivalued treatment with positivity constraints.Sociological methods & research · 2025Article
- Distinguishing cause from effect in psychological research: An independence-based approach under linear non-Gaussian models.The British journal of mathematical and statistical psychology · 2025Article
- Robustness is better assessed with a few thoughtful models than with billions of regressions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Personality and Meat Consumption Among Romantic Partners in Daily Life.Journal of personality · 2025Article
- Questionable generalizability of Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test-Consumption scoring warrants caution when used for outcome monitoring: Evidence from simulated and real-world trial data.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Article
127 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
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Endogenous selection bias is a central problem for causal inference. Recognizing the problem, however, can be difficult in practice. This article introduces a purely graphical way of characterizing endogenous selection bias and of understanding its consequences (Hernán et al. 2004). We use causal graphs (direct acyclic graphs, or DAGs) to highlight that endogenous selection bias stems from conditioning (e.g., controlling, stratifying, or selecting) on a so-called collider variable, i.e., a variable that is itself caused by two other variables, one that is (or is associated with) the treatment and another that is (or is associated with) the outcome. Endogenous selection bias can result from direct conditioning on the outcome variable, a post-outcome variable, a post-treatment variable, and even a pre-treatment variable. We highlight the difference between endogenous selection bias, common-cause confounding, and overcontrol bias and discuss numerous examples from social stratification, cultural sociology, social network analysis, political sociology, social demography, and the sociology of education.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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.