An application of principal stratification to control for institutionalization at follow-up in studies of substance abuse treatment programs

DOI10.1214/08-AOAS179zbMATH Open1149.62328arXiv0811.1831WikidataQ37359221 ScholiaQ37359221MaRDI QIDQ958331FDOQ958331

Beth Ann Griffin, Daniel F. McCaffrey, Andrew R. Morral

Publication date: 3 December 2008

Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Participants in longitudinal studies on the effects of drug treatment and criminal justice system interventions are at high risk for institutionalization (e.g., spending time in an environment where their freedom to use drugs, commit crimes, or engage in risky behavior may be circumscribed). Methods used for estimating treatment effects in the presence of institutionalization during follow-up can be highly sensitive to assumptions that are unlikely to be met in applications and thus likely to yield misleading inferences. In this paper we consider the use of principal stratification to control for institutionalization at follow-up. Principal stratification has been suggested for similar problems where outcomes are unobservable for samples of study participants because of dropout, death or other forms of censoring. The method identifies principal strata within which causal effects are well defined and potentially estimable. We extend the method of principal stratification to model institutionalization at follow-up and estimate the effect of residential substance abuse treatment versus outpatient services in a large scale study of adolescent substance abuse treatment programs. Additionally, we discuss practical issues in applying the principal stratification model to data. We show via simulation studies that the model can only recover true effects provided the data meet strenuous demands and that there must be caution taken when implementing principal stratification as a technique to control for post-treatment confounders such as institutionalization.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0811.1831

zbMATH Keywords

causal inferenceprincipal stratificationinstitutionalizationpost-treatment confounder

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Censored data models (62N01) Estimation in survival analysis and censored data (62N02) Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10) Applications of statistics to social sciences (62P25)

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Cited In (6)

• Handling parametric assumptions in principal causal effect estimation using Gaussian mixtures
• Sensitivity analysis for principal ignorability violation in estimating complier and noncomplier average causal effects
• Large sample bounds on the survivor average causal effect in the presence of a binary covariate with conditionally ignorable treatment assignment
• A likelihood-based analysis for relaxing the exclusion restriction in randomized experiments with noncompliance
• The potential for bias in principal causal effect estimation when treatment received depends on a key covariate
• An application of principal stratification to control for institutionalization at follow-up in studies of substance abuse treatment programs

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