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Ask yourself these true or false questions:

1. Generalizability and transportability and external validity are all the same thing
2. Generalizability is a secondary concern to internal validity
3. We spend too much time in epi training programs teaching internal validity and not enough teaching external validity
4. Worrying about external validity is largely and academic exercise that doesn’t really have much in the way of real-world impact.

In this episode of SERious Epi we discuss these questions and more with Dr. Megha Mehrotra. While internal and external validity are familiar to nearly all epidemiologists, the concept of transportability is less familiar. Listen in to this episode for a clear description of how concepts related to validity, generalizability, and transportability are similar, and different, from each other.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:45 — 41.0MB)

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Matching is something we learn about in our intro to epidemiology classes and yet we probably spend little time thinking about it after that, we just do it. But when should we match and when does it help us and when does it hurt us? What do we need to consider before we match? Dr. Anusha Vable joins us to help us understand matching in detail.

For those of you looking to do more reading around matching see:

• Ho, D., Imai, K., King, G., & Stuart, E. (2007). Matching as Nonparametric Preprocessing for Reducing Model Dependence in Parametric Causal Inference. Political Analysis, 15(3), 199-236. doi:10.1093/pan/mpl013
• Stuart EA. Matching methods for causal inference: A review and a look forward. Stat Sci. 2010 Feb 1;25(1):1-21. doi: 10.1214/09-STS313. PMID: 20871802; PMCID: PMC2943670.
• Vable AM, Kiang MV, Glymour MM, Rigdon J, Drabo EF, Basu S. Performance of Matching Methods as Compared With Unmatched Ordinary Least Squares Regression Under Constant Effects. Am J Epidemiol. 2019 Jul 1;188(7):1345-1354. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwz093. PMID: 30995301; PMCID: PMC6601529.
• Iacus, S., King, G., & Porro, G. (2012). Causal Inference without Balance Checking: Coarsened Exact Matching. Political Analysis, 20(1), 1-24. doi:10.1093/pan/mpr013