Question

Explain why it is difficult to identify a treatment effect for a single individual?

Answer 1

1- It is difficult to identify a treatment effect for a single individual because treatments are the unique feature of experimental research that sets this design apart from all other research methods.

2- Treatment manipulation helps control for the cause in cause effect relationships .Naturally, the validity of experimental research depends on how well the treatment was manipulated.

3-The term treatment effect refers to the casual effect of a binary (0-1) variable on an outcome variable of scientific or policy interest.

4-Treatment effects can be estimated using social experiments, regression models,matching estimators, and instrumental variables.

5- An effect size is a statistical calculation that can be used to compare the efficacy of different agents by quantifying the size of the difference between treatments.

6-The effect of treatment on the treated (ETT) is a casual effect commonly used in the econo- metric literature.

7-The ETT is typically of interest when evaluating the effect of schemes that require voluntary participation from eligible members of the population- those who participate are regarded as the treated.

8-Identifying Assumptions made about the GDP that allows you to draw causal inference.E.g. exogeneity assumption in diff- in - diff .

9-Identifying ass6( lack of endogeneity in general) can never be statistically confirmed ( a non - reject is good , but it's not confirmation).

10-Cohen suggested that d= 0.2 be considered a small effect size, 0.5 represents a medium effect size and 0.8 a large effect size .

11-This means that if two groups means don't differ by 0.2 standard deviations or more, the difference is trivial, even if it is statistically significant.

12- Understanding Different Types of Treatments -

1- Watch and Wait.

2- Chemotherapy or other drug therapies.

3- Radiation therapy.

4- Immunotherapy.

5- Vaccine therapy.

6- Stem cell transplantation.

7- Blood transfusion.

8- Palliative care.

13- How precise was the Estimate of the Treatment Effect? We usually use the 95% CI (Confidence Intervals ).

14-You can consider the 95% CI as defining the range that assuming the study was well conducted and has minimal bias- includes the true RRR 95% of the time.

15-Varadhan T, Seeger JD. Patient populations within a research study are heterogeneous.

16-Heterogeneous of treatment effect (HTE) is the nonrandom,explainable variability in the direction and magnitude of treatment effects for individuals within a population.