ArticleAnnals of epidemiology2022
Heterogeneous treatment effects in social policy studies: An assessment of contemporary articles in the health and social sciences.
Article in Annals of epidemiology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Socioeconomic status and cognitive function in older adults: the mediating roles of social activity and loneliness in three aging cohorts.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Fair Workweek laws in the US: An appraisal of intended and unintended consequences.Science advances · 2026Article
- Estimating and discovering heterogeneous treatment effects using machine learning in epidemiological studies: a practical guide.International journal of epidemiology · 2026Review
- Health Effects of the 2021 Earned Income Tax Credit Expansion on Young Adults Without Children.The Milbank quarterly · 2025Article
- Review
- Investigating heterogeneous effects of an expanded methadone access policy with opioid treatment program retention: a Rhode Island population-based retrospective cohort study.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Poverty and Childhood Obesity: Current Evidence and Methodologies for Future Research.Current obesity reports · 2025Review
- Evidence for Public Policies to Prevent Suicide Death in the United States.Annual review of public health · 2025Review
- Early childhood education and handgun carrying, serious fighting, and assault charges: a retrospective cohort study.Health affairs scholar · 2025Article
- Two-step pragmatic subgroup discovery for heterogeneous treatment effects analyses: perspectives toward enhanced interpretability.European journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Assessing Links Between Alcohol Exposure and Firearm Violence: A Scoping Review Update.Alcohol research : current reviews · 2025Article
- Machine learning for detection of heterogeneous effects of Medicaid coverage on depression.American journal of epidemiology · 2024Article
- Verbal Learning and Memory Deficits across Neurological and Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Insights from an ENIGMA Mega Analysis.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Testing for intersectional measurement invariance with the alignment method: Evaluation of the 8-item patient health questionnaire.Health services research · 2023Article
- A quantitative assessment of the frequency and magnitude of heterogeneous treatment effects in studies of the health effects of social policies.SSM - population health · 2023Article
- Accounting for expected attrition in the planning of cluster randomized trials for assessing treatment effect heterogeneity.BMC medical research methodology · 2023Article
- Assessment of the predictive power of a causal variable: An application to the Head Start impact study.SSM - population health · 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
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
purposeSocial policies are important determinants of population health but may have varying effects on subgroups of people. Evaluating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) of social policies is critical to determine how social policies will affect health inequities. Methods for evaluating HTEs are not standardized. Little is known about how often and by what methods HTEs are assessed in social policy and health research.
methodsA sample of 55 articles from 2019 on the health effects of social policies were evaluated for frequency of reporting HTEs; for what subgroupings HTEs were reported; frequency of a priori specification of intent to assess HTEs; and methods used for assessing HTEs.
resultsA total of 24 (44%) studies described some form of HTE assessment, including by age, gender, education, race/ethnicity, and/or geography. Among studies assessing HTEs, 63% specified HTE assessment a priori, and most (71%) used descriptive methods such as stratification; 21% used statistical tests (e.g., interaction terms in a regression); and no studies used data-driven algorithms.
conclusionsAlthough understanding HTEs could enhance policy and practice-based efforts to reduce inequities, it is not routine research practice. Increased evaluation of HTEs across relevant subgroups is needed.
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.