Biostatistics Commons^™

Instrumental Variable Analyses: Exploiting Natural Randomness To Understand Causal Mechanisms, Theodore Iwashyna, Edward Kennedy

Edward H. Kennedy

Instrumental variable analysis is a technique commonly used in the social sciences to provide evidence that a treatment causes an outcome, as contrasted with evidence that a treatment is merely associated with differences in an outcome. To extract such strong evidence from observational data, instrumental variable analysis exploits situations where some degree of randomness affects how patients are selected for a treatment. An instrumental variable is a characteristic of the world that leads some people to be more likely to get the specific treatment we want to study but does not otherwise change thosepatients’ outcomes. This seminar explains, in nonmathematical …