The following seminar will be given by Daniel S. Nagin, Teresa and H. John
Heinz III Professor of Public Policy and Statistics at the Heinz School,
Carnegie Mellon University. The seminar will take place on Tuesday 28 June at
1:30 at the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues, 7
Bedford Square. A map detailing the location of the Institute can be found at
http://www.iscfsi.bbk.ac.uk/location.asp
The Institute is numbered 17.
Causal Inferences with Group Based Trajectory Models – With Application to the
Impact of Gang Membership on Violent Delinquency
Abstract
A central theme of research on human development and psychopathology is whether
a therapeutic intervention or a turning point event, such as a family break-up,
alters the trajectory of the behavior under study. This talk describes a method
for using observational longitudinal data to make more confident causal
inferences about the impact of such events on developmental trajectories. The
method draws upon two distinct lines of research: Work on the use of finite
mixture modeling to analyze developmental trajectories and work on propensity
scores. The essence of the method is to use the posterior probabilities of
trajectory group membership from a finite mixture modeling framework to create
balance on lagged outcomes and other covariates established prior to t for the
purpose of inferring the impact of first-time treatment at t on the outcome of
interest. The approach is demonstrated with an analysis of the impact of gang
membership on violent delinquency based on data from a large longitudinal study
conducted in Montréal.
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Alastair H Leyland
MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow
4 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RZ, Scotland, U.K.
Tel: +44 (0)141 357 7504 Fax: +44 (0)141 337 2389
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.msoc-mrc.gla.ac.uk
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