ArticleHealth services & outcomes research methodology2023
A tutorial comparing different covariate balancing methods with an application evaluating the causal effects of substance use treatment programs for adolescents.
Article in Health services & outcomes research methodology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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.
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.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Volunteer Recovery Support for Adolescents: Using propensity score based methods to understand dosage effects within a randomized controlled trial.Journal of substance abuse treatment · 2022Trial
- Variation in early-life maltreatment effects on adolescent psychopathology due to contamination.Journal of traumatic stress · 2026Observational
- Adverse Events Associated with Advanced Therapy Compared with Conventional Therapy in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Common Data Model Analysis.Gut and liver · 2026Observational
- Associating liver partition and portal vein ligation for staged hepatectomy (ALPPS)Hepatobiliary surgery and nutrition · 2026Article
- Television and computer use and dementia risk in older adults with limited leisure or social activities: A prospective cohort study.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- A comparison of allied healthcare versus no allied healthcare on participation, fatigue, physical functioning and health-related quality of life for patients with persistent complaints after a COVID-19 infection.Annals of medicine · 2025Article
- Article
- Influence of different endodontic treatment protocols on tooth survival: A retrospective cohort study with multistate analysis and group balancing.International endodontic journal · 2025Article
- Assessing Covariate Balance With Small Sample Sizes.Statistics in medicine · 2025Article
- Disruptive Child Behavior and Income Inequality: Examining Long-term Maintenance of Family Income Levels in Families Receiving Parent-Training.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2025Article
- Assessing Covariate Balance with Small Sample Sizes.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Forest dynamics where typhoon winds blow.The New phytologist · 2025Article
- An outcome-wide analysis of the effects of diagnostic labeling of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias on social relationships.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2024Article
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- Article
- Prognostic impacts of participation in prospective surgical clinical trials on surgical outcomes in gastric cancer patients.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Procalcitonin Evaluation of Antibiotic Use in COVID-19 Hospitalised Patients (PEACH): Protocol for a Retrospective Observational Study.Methods and protocols · 2022Article
- Kidney nonprocurement in deceased donors with acute kidney injury.Clinical transplantation · 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 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard for measuring causal effects. However, they are often not always feasible, and causal treatment effects must be estimated from observational data. Observational studies do not allow robust conclusions about causal relationships unless statistical techniques account for the imbalance of pretreatment confounders across groups and key assumptions hold. Propensity score and balance weighting (PSBW) are useful techniques that aim to reduce the observed imbalances between treatment groups by weighting the groups to look alike on the observed confounders. Notably, there are many methods available to estimate PSBW. However, it is unclear a priori which will achieve the best trade-off between covariate balance and effective sample size for a given application. Moreover, it is critical to assess the validity of key assumptions required for robust estimation of the needed treatment effects, including the overlap and no unmeasured confounding assumptions. We present a step-by-step guide to the use of PSBW for estimation of causal treatment effects that includes steps on how to evaluate overlap before the analysis, obtain estimates of PSBW using multiple methods and select the optimal one, check for covariate balance on multiple metrics, and assess sensitivity of findings (both the estimated treatment effect and statistical significance) to unobserved confounding. We illustrate the key steps using a case study examining the relative effectiveness of substance use treatment programs and provide a user-friendly Shiny application that can implement the proposed steps for any application with binary treatments.
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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.