Abstract
William G. Cochran first presented “observational studies” as a topic defined by principles and methods of statistics. Cochran had been an author of the 1964 United States Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee Report, Smoking and Health, which reviewed a vast literature and concluded: “Cigarette smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men; the magnitude of the effect of cigarette smoking far outweighs all other factors. The data for women, though less extensive, point in the same direction (p. 37) .” Though there had been some experiments confined to laboratory animals, the direct evidence linking smoking with human health came from observational or nonexperimental studies.
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References
Most scientific fields that study human populations conduct observational studies. Many fields have developed a literature on the design, conduct, and interpretation of observational studies, often with little reference to related work in other fields. It is not possible to do justice to these several literatures in a short bibliographic note. There follows a short and incomplete list of fine books that contain substantial general discussions of the methodology used for observational studies in epidemiology, public program evaluation, or the social sciences. A shared goal in these diverse works is evaluation of treatments, exposures, programs, or policies from nonexperimental data. The list is followed by references cited in Chapter 1.
Some Books and a Few Papers
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Rosenbaum, P.R. (2002). Observational Studies. In: Observational Studies. Springer Series in Statistics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3692-2_1
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