ArticleSociological methods & research2024
The gap-closing estimand: A causal approach to study interventions that close disparities across social categories.
Article in Sociological methods & research, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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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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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stress reactivity and maternal health (STRIVE): protocol for a multisite observational cohort study.BMJ open · 2025Article
- The Target Study: A Conceptual Model and Framework for Measuring Disparity.Sociological methods & research · 2025Article
- A Calibrated Sensitivity Analysis for Weighted Causal Decompositions.Statistics in medicine · 2025Article
- A Review of the Causal Decomposition Framework for Modeling Interventions that Reduce Disparities.Current epidemiology reports · 2025Article
- The causal impact of segregation on a disparity: A gap-closing approach.Sociological science · 2025Article
- A hypothetical intervention to reduce inequities in anxiety for Multiracial people: simulating an intervention on childhood adversity.American journal of epidemiology · 2024Article
- Evaluating Effects of Multilevel Interventions on Disparity in Health and Healthcare Decisions.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2024Article
- CARDIA sleep ancillary study: study design and methods.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2024Article
- The care of non-institutionalized ADL-dependent people in the Orcasitas neighborhood of Madrid (Spain) during the Covid-19 pandemic and its relationship with social inequalities, intergenerational dependency and survival.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Recent Developments in Causal Inference and Machine Learning.Annual review of sociology · 2023Article
- COVID-19 Mortality by Race and Ethnicity in US Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Areas, March 2020 to February 2022.JAMA network open · 2023Article
- Causal Estimands and Multiply Robust Estimation of Mediated-Moderation.Multivariate behavioral researchArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
Disparities across race, gender, and class are important targets of descriptive research. But rather than only describe disparities, research would ideally inform interventions to close those gaps. The gap-closing estimand quantifies how much a gap (e.g. incomes by race) would close if we intervened to equalize a treatment (e.g. access to college). Drawing on causal decomposition analyses, this type of research question yields several benefits. First, gap-closing estimands place categories like race in a causal framework without making them play the role of the treatment (which is philosophically fraught for non-manipulable variables). Second, gap-closing estimands empower researchers to study disparities using new statistical and machine learning estimators designed for causal effects. Third, gap-closing estimands can directly inform policy: if we sampled from the population and actually changed treatment assignments, how much could we close gaps in outcomes? I provide open-source software (the R package gapclosing) to support these methods.
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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.