{"id":32159,"date":"2014-08-15T14:43:31","date_gmt":"2014-08-15T13:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=32159"},"modified":"2014-08-15T14:43:31","modified_gmt":"2014-08-15T13:43:31","slug":"stuart-buck-are-scholars-or-journalists-more-to-blame-when-correlation-and-causation-are-confused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2014\/08\/15\/stuart-buck-are-scholars-or-journalists-more-to-blame-when-correlation-and-causation-are-confused\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuart Buck: Are scholars or journalists more to blame when correlation and causation are confused?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stuart_Buck\"<\/a>News stories about everything from nutrition to epidemiology to family behavior often confuse correlation with causation. Drink coffee, we are told, and you will lower your risk of dying (or perhaps raise it, depending on the week). Get married, and you will have stronger bones<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sophisticated news consumers in the know understand that it’s best to discount such stories, which do not report on randomized experiments or any other statistical model that could show causation. The articles are invariably about correlations\u2014akin to demonstrating that sunburn goes up along with accidental drowning, which is true not because either one causes the other, but because both occur in the summer.<\/p>\n

Why are these stories so common, though? In many cases, the problem is that journalists overemphasize the possibility of causation, while failing to mention any disclaimers that the scholarly authors may have tried to highlight. Yet\u00a0it is not always the journalists\u2019 fault. A recent controversy shows that some social scientists do not even seem to understand that they mentioned causation in the first place.<\/p>\n

The study in question<\/a> came from the August issue of Demography<\/em>. On the basis of a nationally representative longitudinal survey of American elderly adults, the authors claimed that, even after controlling for parents\u2019 own education level and income, having children who graduated from college\u2014as compared to dropping out of high school\u2014raised the parents\u2019 lifespan from 69 to 71 years.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, journalists from the Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> to the Washington Post<\/em><\/a> wrote articles claiming that sending your children to college will make you live longer. In turn, an economist writing in the New York Times<\/a><\/em> and my own article in Slate<\/em><\/a> strongly criticized the scholarly article for confusing correlation and causation. As I pointed out, the authors claimed that adult children who go to college could increase their parents\u2019 lifespan by having \u201cmore flexible jobs\u201d or more \u201ccomfort with the Internet.\u201d But a far more likely possibility is that unobserved factors like parental motivation are causing both<\/em> college attendance and a longer life.<\/p>\n

The authors wrote a curious response to these criticisms<\/a> on the Rand<\/em> blog. They now say, \u201cCorrelation does not prove causation\u2014yes, we know this. Nowhere in our article do we assert that the relationship we find is causal. On the contrary, we discuss this limitation at length in our work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nowhere? The article is full of causal statements. Here is a partial list from the \u201cDiscussion\u201d section alone (emphasis mine):<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u201cWe show that later in life, adult offspring become critical for ensuring<\/em> the health and survival of their parents.\u201d
\n\u2022 \u201cThis research isolates a mechanism<\/em> through which differences in health and mortality come about<\/em>, to wit: the differential educational attainments of offspring.\u201d
\n\u2022 \u201cOur results suggest that in the United States, parents benefit<\/em> from having more educated offspring\u2014a benefit that extends beyond the effects of parents\u2019 own SES [socioeconomic status].\u201d
\n\u2022 \u201cThis work shows that another way to influence<\/em> the health of the elderly is through their offspring.\u201d
\n\u2022 \u201cPolicies targeting one generation of the family may set in motion a series of reactions that lead to improved health<\/em> for others in previous generations.\u201d
\n\u2022 \u201cImproving offspring\u2019s lives may benefit<\/em> not only the offspring themselves over their lifetimes but their parents as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of these statements directly point to causality: if A \u201cbenefit[s]\u201d or \u201clead[s] to\u201d or \u201cinfluence[s]\u201d or \u201cimprove[s]\u201d or is \u201ccritical for ensuring\u201d B, that means that A is playing a causal role as to B. Some of these statements are hedged with words like \u201csuggest\u201d or \u201cmay,\u201d but others are not. In either case, the authors repeatedly attribute a causal role to children in affecting their parents\u2019 lifespan.<\/p>\n

To be fair, the authors do concede that \u201cfinding such a relationship does not prove a causal interaction (for instance, unobserved personality traits might be associated with parental mortality, parental health behaviors, and offspring\u2019s schooling).\u201d But this brief concession is undermined by all the claims of causation elsewhere. Indeed, on the article\u2019s final page, the authors briefly acknowledge the \u201cpossible endogeneity of offspring’s schooling with parental mortality,\u201d and if they wished to avoid claims of causality, that would have been the place to admit that their analysis cannot<\/em> show that offspring actually improve their parents\u2019 survival.<\/p>\n

But they did the exact opposite: the same paragraph goes on to say that \u201cwe choose to examine the causal nature of this relationship more descriptively,\u201d thereby showing that \u201cone way highly educated offspring improve parents\u2019 survival chances is by improving their parents\u2019 health behaviors.\u201d In other words, even after acknowledging an endogeneity concern that should have been fatal, the authors still claim to have found that offspring \u201cimprove\u201d\u2014an undeniably causal term\u2014both their parents\u2019 behavior and lifespan.<\/p>\n

A further wrinkle is that, in the authors\u2019 response, they say that the \u201cmain novelty of our article was to advance the idea that a possible mechanism that underpins differences in mortality among older persons is the resources and behaviors of their adult offspring.\u201d<\/p>\n

But their method of isolating a mechanism seems wrong. The authors say in their article that they want to find out \u201cwhether offspring improve [note that this is causal language] their parents\u2019 health by changing their health behaviors\u201d via a plausible mechanism or mediator, such as less parental smoking or more parental exercise. After all, if offspring schooling is connected to mortality only through parents\u2019 accidental deaths or something else that offspring do not generally affect, then there would be no causal mechanism between offspring schooling and parental survival.<\/p>\n

The authors then look first at whether offspring schooling directly predicts parental behaviors like smoking or exercise. Having found that it does (this is still sheer correlation, by the way), they return to their Cox mortality model and start adding control variables for parental behavior, like “ever smoked,” or smokes now, or exercises. They say that adding in these parental behaviors lowers the coefficients on offspring education. Thus, \u201cthe hypothesis that health behaviors are part of how offspring\u2019s schooling is translated into survival gains [causal language yet again] for parents is supported by these findings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given that “ever smoked” is also<\/em> a parental behavior that changes the coefficient on offspring schooling, then one of two things must be true:
\n1) Children who graduate from college are somehow going back in time and preventing their parents from \u201cever\u201d smoking in the past; or,
\n2) The authors’ way of trying to show causation is irremediably flawed, as it implies the impossible.<\/p>\n

In other words, the authors\u2019 attempt to demonstrate a mechanism between children\u2019s schooling and parental lifespan does not make sense\u2014it merely amounts to showing that children\u2019s schooling is correlated with other things about parents, including the way the parents behaved before the children even existed. This provides further evidence that it is actually parents\u2019 characteristics that affect their children\u2019s education, rather than vice versa.<\/p>\n

The broader lesson here is that when scholars do not acknowledge how often they have used causal language, journalists need to be ever more skeptical readers of research. In turn, if journalists fail to question scholars\u2019 assertions of causation, readers might be better off ignoring a good deal of science journalism altogether. Better science and better science journalism are what society needs in order to make informed decisions.<\/p>\n

Stuart Buck is the vice president of research integrity at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation<\/a>, and manages an initiative dedicated to improving science research. He is also\u00a0on the board of the new Center for Healthcare Transparency<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Competing interests: The author has no relevant competing interests to declare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

News stories about everything from nutrition to epidemiology to family behavior often confuse correlation with causation. Drink coffee, we are told, and you will lower your risk of dying (or […]<\/p>\n

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