Hey y’all

In this seventh post of the causal inference series, we apply our approach to ordinal models. Ordinal models make causal inference tricky, and it’s not entirely clear what the causal estimand should even be. We explore two of the estimands that have been proposed in the literature, and I offer a third estimand of my own.

So far the difficulties we have seen with covaraites, causal inference, and the GLM have all been restricted to discrete models (e.g., binomial, Poisson, negative binomial). In this sixth post of the series, we’ll see this issue can extend to models for continuous data, too. As it turns out, it may have less to do with the likelihood function, and more to do with the choice of link function. To highlight the point, we’ll compare Gaussian and gamma models, with both the identity and log links.

Abstract Background: The USA is undergoing a suicide epidemic for its youngest Veterans (18-to-34-years-old) as their suicide rate has almost doubled since 2001. Veterans are at the highest risk during their first-year post-discharge, thus creating a “deadly gap.” In response, the nation has developed strategies that emphasize a preventive, universal, and public health approach and embrace the value of community interventions. The three-step theory of suicide suggests that community interventions that reduce reintegration difficulties and promote connectedness for Veterans as they transition to civilian life have the greatest likelihood of reducing suicide.

Abstract Research on moral elevation has steadily increased and identified several psychosocial benefits that bear relevance to both the general population and people with psychological distress. However, elevation measurement is inconsistent, and few state-level measures have been created and critically evaluated to date. To address this gap, the State Moral Elevation Scale (SMES) was developed and tested using an online sample (N = 930) including subsamples of general participants (nonclinical) and those who screened positive for mental health symptoms (clinical).

In partnership with Physalia Course, this will be my first introductory Bayesian statistics workshop since grad school.