Call me names – spurious relationships in the wild
Don’t you feel that when we talk about spurious relationships and unobserved confounding, it’s almost like we’re talking about good old friends now? Maybe they are trouble sometimes, yet they just feel so familiar it’s hard to imagine the future without them.
We will start this section with a reflection on naming conventions regarding bias/spurious relationships/confounding across the fields. In the second part of the section, we’ll discuss selection bias as a special subtype of spuriousness that plays an important role in epidemiology.
Names, names, names
Oh boy! Reading about causality across domains can be a confusing experience! Some authors suggest using the term confounding only when there’s a common cause of the treatment and the outcome (Peters et al., 2017, p. 172; Hernán & Robins, 2020, p. 103); others allow using this term also in other cases of spuriousness...