It’s reasonable to be somewhat skeptical based on priors given the statistical power of this (very worthy and interesting!) study? I didn’t dig deeper, but back of the envelope if you draw from 10000 iid households with an infant each and a 4% probability you’d expect a standard deviation around 0.2%, so there’s not much room for slicing the data a lot finer or additional correlation creeping in without a decent amount of sampling error. Obviously, with smarter analysis you can do a bit better and it’s hard and expensive to get more data, but it’s easy to believe the results are biased upwards a bit. The study is a great step in the right direction.
It’s reasonable to be somewhat skeptical based on priors given the statistical power of this (very worthy and interesting!) study? I didn’t dig deeper, but back of the envelope if you draw from 10000 iid households with an infant each and a 4% probability you’d expect a standard deviation around 0.2%, so there’s not much room for slicing the data a lot finer or additional correlation creeping in without a decent amount of sampling error. Obviously, with smarter analysis you can do a bit better and it’s hard and expensive to get more data, but it’s easy to believe the results are biased upwards a bit. The study is a great step in the right direction.