Confounding Factors in Studies
Commenters criticize a scientific study's validity, highlighting uncontrolled confounding variables, lack of randomization, and the distinction between correlation and causation in observational research.
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Have you read the study? How do you know that they didn't control for this? Seems like a pretty spurious assumption.
Be cautious of getting causality claims from studies like this that don't try to control for anything
That's not a randomized controlled trial though. You might find a correlation, but you couldn't actually establish causation, or eliminate hidden variables.
I don't have time to read the study but if you want to have a look yourself, the terms to look for are "confounder", "confounding factor", ...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding
No controlled study was done, so any unexpected confounding factors would invalidate the results. This type of study is nearly pointless when trying to demonstrate a causal link.
You don't think studies control for this?
This feels like a study with many confounding factors.
"is associated" means correlation, usually after whatever attempt (or no attempt, you have to read quite closely to tell) to account for confounding variables.Even if they do make an attempt to control for such things, it's often useless. There's only so much you can do with limited data and if you're not of exceedingly high character, there's a lot of ways to cheat intentionally or accidentally.So, this kind of result means very little. It _may_ be a thing th
These's not a word in abstract of the study [0] that they have controlled for anything. (and I don't say that assuming anything about a study is a bad scientific practice, but I do assume it)[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dar.13239
The effect size isn't large, and the potential cofounding correlations are infinite. This doesn't seem like a good study.