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Some Counterclaims Undermine Themselves

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Design of Observational Studies

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Abstract

A counterclaim disputes the claim that an association between treatment received and outcome exhibited reflects an effect caused by the treatment. Some counterclaims undermine themselves. A supplemental statistical analysis may demonstrate this.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hill [5] invites consideration of these dimensions of a causal claim, but they also merit consideration when evaluating objections or counterclaims. See also [12, 13].

  2. 2.

    Because the US Fatality Analysis Reporting System only records information about crashes with at least one fatality, it has certain limitations —certain “problems of ascertainment” [4] —that affect the types of inferences that may be drawn. These limitations do not affect tests of the hypothesis of no treatment effect, as developed in this chapter, but they would have consequences for estimates of the magnitude of effect that are not discussed here [10].

  3. 3.

    This notation is slightly but not consequentially different from [10].

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R. Rosenbaum, P. (2020). Some Counterclaims Undermine Themselves. In: Design of Observational Studies. Springer Series in Statistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46405-9_7

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