Developing a causal inference course is easier than I thought.

Los Pollos Hermanos! 🐓 Our new cohort study published in JECH: Parental death is linked to increased psychotropic medication use in adults (ages 35–55), especially among those with fewer siblings, highlighting the role of family as a support network.

jech.bmj.com/content/earl...

It's short and not technical. A quick and hopefully interesting read.
After many discussions with co-authors and colleagues, mostly at @pophel.bsky.social, it still seems like a hard to navigate space.
Is there something valuable between descriptive and causal?
I'd love to hear people's thoughts!

On the space between descriptive and causal estimands with Annie Herbert, Anna Pearce and @vkatikireddi.bsky.social
Descriptive estimands, causal estimands, and avoiding the jungle of adjusted associations in between
doi.org/10.1136/jech...

Don't get lost in the jungle of adjusted associations.

New decomposition method to quantify how specific subpopulations drive demographic gaps. E.g., estimating how foreign-born populations by race and ethnicity contribute to the gap between total and native-born life expectancy.
@eugeniopaglino.bsky.social
👉 www.demographic-research.org/articles/vol...

🚨New paper out in Demographic Research🚨 and my first foray into demographic methods. It develops a new method to quantify how specific subpopulations drive demographic gaps. www.demographic-research.org/articles/vol...
@demresjournal.bsky.social @pophel.bsky.social #demography #methods

"Temporary shock or lasting scar?"
By 2024 nearly all high-income countries remained below their pre-pandemic life expectancy trends. We identify four distinct mortality shock patterns since 2020. Full analysis in our preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

1 week left to submit your abstract for SSMPH EuroEpi 2026!!

➡️ hg3.co.uk/ssm/

Submission deadline: 23:59 (GMT), Monday 2nd March

📆 9-11 Sep 2026
Venue: Mile End Campus, QMUL, London

Is there a good reason to still put so much emphasis on hypothesis testing in quant methods courses for social science (esp. undergrad) students? What would we lose if we mentioned it but instead emphasised the estimand framework?

International Spring School in Global Health 2026 - ISGLOBAL

Excited to be delivering a session on better incorporating geography in intersectional inequalities research at the ISGlobal Spring School in March. It is free to attend and today is the final day to sign up. Further information here: www.isglobal.org/en/-/interna...

Causal Inference and the People's Health Abstract. This book examines the implications of the “Causal Revolution” in epidemiology for the people’s health. Since the turn of the 21st century, this

I read an excellent discussion of this in "Causal Inference and the People's Health" doi.org/10.1093/oso/...
People may recognise this distinction from "forward" and "backward" causal thinking more used in other social sciences. Maybe simpler jargon than "effects of causes" and "causes of effects"

Header for Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health -text on blue /pink background

📢 How can systematic reviews better address health equity—even when equity isn’t the main focus? A paper by Dr Mhairi Campbell, with @vkatikireddi.bsky.social (Causal Estimations package) sets out practical ways to build equity into evidence reviews that shape health decisions. Read: bit.ly/3ZfkCIE

Difficult. Helpful for me was that epi methods traditionally need to care about "effects of causes" - what's the effect of intervention X? That is also useful for social epi
but often social epi is confronted with "causes of effects" questions - Does A have a higher incidence than B because of X?

FULLY FUNDED PhD - Actionable Evidence for More Health Equity Among the UK’s Future Workforces – A Synthetic Population and Simulation Approach at University of Glasgow on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - FULLY FUNDED PhD - Actionable Evidence for More Health Equity Among the UK’s Future Workforces – A Synthetic Population and Simulation Approach at University of Glasgow, listed on FindAP...

Passionate about health equity? 📣 Join the #Equalise team and help make a difference with a fully funded PhD opportunity at the University of Glasgow @glasgow.ac.uk.
✍ Further information & how to apply: shorturl.at/yn3Sh
#PhD #PhDFunding
@celsenbroich.bsky.social @pmeierprof.bsky.social

Intersectional Inequalities in Neighbourhood Air Pollution Concentration in England: A Quantitative Analysis of Ecological Data Using Eco-Intersectional Multilevel (EIM) Modelling - Applied Spatial An... Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy - Air pollution is detrimentally associated with many health outcomes, yet its impacts are not equally distributed. Research consistently finds inequalities by...

📢 New paper! We examine intersectional inequalities in neighbourhood air pollution concentration by area deprivation, ethnicity, education, rurality and age. We find evidence of patterns of inequality which depart from an additive framework link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🏠 Homeownership is often framed as protective for #wellbeing. But less is known about what happens when #homeownership becomes a burden…

Our new paper out in Social Science & Medicine shows that #mortgage affordability matters for #MentalHealth.

doi.org/10.1016/j.so...

CIIG seminar with George Davey Smith on 26 January 2026 3pm GMT

If you are interested in the past, present, and future of Mendelian Randomisation, join us later this month for a Causal Inference Interest Group seminar on MR with none other than @mendelrandom.bsky.social

Zoom registration link: ucl.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Happy New Year!
2026 already offers lots of opportunities to join or visit the MPIDR – last call!

These four MPIDR calls end in January.

Jobs:
www.demogr.mpg.de/en/career_61...

www.demogr.mpg.de/en/career_61...
Visit:
incubator.demogr.mpg.de
Conference:
www.demogr.mpg.de/en/news_even...

Again an open position at the MaxHel Center. This time at the Max (Rostock) part of MaxHel. deadline is the 11th of January!

www.demogr.mpg.de/en/career_61...

Did the 1918 influenza pandemic cause a 1920 baby boom? Demographic evidence from neutral Europe In 1919–20, the European countries that were neutral in the First World War saw a small baby bust followed by a small baby boom. The sparse literature on this topic attributes the 1919 bust to indi...

And for all the 1918 flu cohort studies that compare 1919 to all surrounding cohorts, including 1920, the water is doubly muddied: fertility patterns make it look like any compositional changes persisted into 1920, causing bias in the opposite direction too (2/2)

doi.org/10.1080/0032...

The Lockdown Cohort-Effect: Does the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on fertility lead to long-term consequences for health and public services provision? | LoCo-Effect | Project | Fact Sheet ... The COVID-19 pandemic placed a heavy social and health burden on populations. Yet, because of social inequalities in the pandemic’s impact on fertility behaviour, babies conceived during the pandemic ...

And of course thanks to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme under @horizoneu.bsky.social for funding this work cordis.europa.eu/project/id/1...

This was a big data collaboration effort with 14 supportive colleagues. A big thanks to all of them for their contributions!
Some of the have an account here:
@sammalmaetaes.bsky.social
@thomaswhitecrane.bsky.social
@jaspervbeen.bsky.social
@pfallesen.bsky.social

Our study covers births from Austria, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, England, Finland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Scotland, South Australia, Spain, Sweden, the United States, Wales. If you are interested in a specific country, have a look at our country profiles in the supplement. material.

Screenshot of the title and abstract: Parental socioeconomic composition of birth cohorts changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic offers opportunities to study effects of in-utero and early life exposure to environmental changes. However, inferences from such studies may be flawed if the pandemic has changed the socioeconomic composition of parents. Analysing over 77.9 million live births from 15 countries, we estimate changes in the socioeconomic composition of the cohort born between December 2020 and December 2021 using interrupted time series analysis. We find that, compared with their counterfactual compositions, the December 2020-December 2021 birth cohort has a higher proportion of babies born to socioeconomically advantaged parents in Austria, England, Finland, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Wales, and the United States while we observe the opposite change for Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. These changes in cohort composition may cause between-cohort differences in life course outcomes that are influenced by parental socioeconomic circumstances even if early life exposure to the pandemic had no direct effect on this birth cohort.

Figure 4 in the article. Figure caption: The black dots are percentage-point differences derived from the estimated mean counterfactual number of live births using interrupted time series Poisson regressions on the number of live births. 95% confidence intervals presented as horizontal lines around the point estimates are estimated using a three-step approach (see method section). Estimates are based on 596,276 live births for Austria; 19,995,228 for Brazil; 4,329,577 for Colombia; 413,903 for Denmark; 1,965,574 for Ecuador; 4,391,999 for England; 330,063 for Finland; 12,876,945 for Mexico; 1,167,024 for the Netherlands; 343,379 for Scotland; 134,874 for South Australia; 2,229,935 for Spain; 758,034 for Sweden; 22,306,054 for the United States; 216,797 for Wales. For Spain, only births with maternal age over 25 are included (see methods and suppl. material). Quintiles of equivalised household income and area deprivation are abbreviated by the letter Q. Q5 (highest income, lowest deprivation) denotes the fifth quintile, Q4 the fourth quintile, and so forth. For countries, where only parental educational attainment was available, “Post-Second./ Tert.” denotes post-secondary or tertiary educational attainment, “Upper Second.” denotes upper secondary educational attainment, “Lower Second.” denotes lower secondary educational attainment, and “Prim.” denotes primary educational attainment.

New paper finally published! Using data on 78 million births from 15 countries, we found that babies conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic have a different parental socioeconomic composition than expected had the pandemic not occurred. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
@natcomms.nature.com @helsinki.fi

New study on divorce by @elinaeinio.bsky.social & Ponkilainen shows that women divorcing men face larger losses in homeownership & in retaining the marital home than both their former husbands and women divorcing women. @pophel.bsky.social

🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

PS. Happy New Year! 🥂

„... there are no iron laws of economics keeping us from building a more humane world, …“
Banerjee & Duflo 2019, p. 255

My highlights from the recommendations:
1) Be up front about the research study’s intention - is it to describe, predict or estimate causal effects.
2) Roles of all variables are specified and justified in the text...
Following the recommendations will enable a better peer-review experience

Reflecting on the year passed and the year ahead For many of us, the start of a new calendar year is a time for reflection—of the things that we have to be grateful for and our goals and ambitions for the year ahead. In our first editorial of 2026, ...

News from the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health: doi.org/10.1136/jech...
Annie Herbert and I will co-chair the new Scientific Review Panel at JECH (read more about it in the editorial).
There are new methodological recommendations for authors of quant studies at jech.bmj.com/pages/authors

When kids are ready to learn, Stephen Raudenbush thinks we should be ready to teach. On the latest Inequality Podcast, Raudenbush joins @gtwodtke.bsky.social to discuss how teaching and school structure shape outcomes, and why organizational change might be needed.
Listen → bit.ly/4rwytHh

Today, @lintuslotta.bsky.social defended her doctoral thesis on educational inequalities at the @eui-eu.bsky.social Great defense, thanks to Lotta and the commiittee with @kbkarlson.bsky.social Bess Bukodi and @hermwerf.bsky.social