What is "the power of large sample"? And of course correlation is not causality. One can imagine that in the us, transit riders are shorter than car driver s, because of ethnic difference s in users. And there have been various studies showing a correlation between height and higher pay, partly due to gender disparities.
Marc brenman


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-----Original Message-----

From: thomas.goetschi@uzh.ch
To: h+t--friends@chrispy.net
Cc:
Sent: 2016-12-01 6:48:32 AM
Subject: [H+T--Friends] Antwort: 'Transit Makes You Short'

this may have some value for a journal club - I see flaws at various levels. How it may contribute to our understanding of any possible relationship between  public transport and health escapes me.



Thomas Götschi, PhD

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Inactive hide details for Ann Hartell ---12/01/2016 12:14:34 PM---I'm not sure how many on this list follow David Levinson's blAnn Hartell ---12/01/2016 12:14:34 PM---I'm not sure how many on this list follow David Levinson's blog The Transportist (over here:  https:

Von: Ann Hartell <ahartell@gmail.com>
An: TRB Health and Transportation <h+t--friends@chrispy.net>
Datum: 12/01/2016 12:14 PM
Betreff: [H+T--Friends] 'Transit Makes You Short'
Gesendet von: h+t--friends-bounces@chrispy.net





I'm not sure how many on this list follow David Levinson's blog The Transportist (over here:  https://transportist.org/ ), but he recently published a post about a working paper he co-authored with Alireza Emragun titled  "Transit Makes you Short": On Health Impact Assessment of Transportation and the Built Environment.

The blog post is here:
https://transportist.org/2016/11/28/u-study-says-transit-does-not-have-impact-on-public-health/

The full paper is here:
http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/179812

Abstract:

The current research provides a test framework to understand whether and to what extent increasing public transit use and accessibility by transit affect health. To this end, the effect of transit mode share and accessibility by transit on general health, body mass index, and height are investigated, while controlling for socioeconomic, demographic, and physical activity factors. The coefficient-p-value-sample-size chart is created and effect size analysis are conducted to explore whether the transit use is practically significant. Building on the results of the analysis, we found that the transit mode share and accessibility by transit are not practically significant, and the power of large-sample misrepresents the effect of transit on public health. The results, also, highlight the importance of data and variable selection by portraying a significant correlation between transit use and height in a multivariate regression analysis. What becomes clear from this study is that in spite of the mushrooming interdisciplinary studies in the nexus of transportation and health arena, researchers often propose short- and long-term policies blindly, while failing to report the inherent explanatory power of variables. We show that there is a thin line between false positive and true negative results. From the weakness of p-values perspective, further, we strove to alert both researchers and practitioners to the dangerous pitfall deriving from the power of large- samples. Building the results on just significance and sign of the parameter of interest is worthless, unless the magnitude of effect size is carefully quantified post analysis.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ann Hartell
Doctoral Candidate
Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien/Vienna University of Economics and Business

https://www.wu.ac.at/en/mlgd/

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