Methods & Issues Seminar: Causal inference in observational settings. A preliminary review 
26 April 2012
12.30pm - 1.30pm
Venue: Room 373, Building 730, School of Population Health, Tāmaki Innovation Campus
Speaker: Professor Peter Davis, Director of the COMPASS research centre.
Most public health research is carried out in observational settings. Yet such research can rarely generate inferences of a conventional causal status to inform public health intervention. However, advances have been made in helping researchers develop and draw more credible inferences from such data. These advances have come particularly from logicians and philosophers, who have generalised to observational work a variant of the model of causal inference based on the experiment (potential outcomes, counterfactuals) and from applied statisticians, particularly those working in econometrics and in educational and applied social research who are concerned with drawing conclusions about policies and interventions.
This seminar will review this work, which is preparatory to compiling a reader on the topic in the Sage Benchmark series in Social Research Methods. Examples will be given from the literature.
Speaker: Professor Peter Davis is Professor of the Sociology of Health and Well-Being in the Faculty of Arts and Director of the COMPASS research centre. He is currently Senior Editor, Health Policy, at Social Science and Medicine and has a cross-appointment in the School of Population Health. Much of the work of COMPASS is in health and social policy applications deplying advanced methodological techniques with existing data.
Chaired by Prof Mark Elwood, Professor of Cancer Epidemiology, School of Population Health
