Pandemics & Society Seminar, 9th October: “Mismeasuring pandemics in causal research: Errors, biases, mismatched estimands, ambiguous channels, and the 1918 influenza pandemic”
For the fourth Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Fall 2025 series we are pleased to welcome Hampton Gaddy (London School of Economics & University of Oxford). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 9th October at the normal time (1600 CEST). More information about our speaker and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
Blurb: A large body of social science and health research uses measures of the 1918 influenza pandemic’s mortality to estimate what the biosocial effects of the pandemic were. However, many of the pandemic measures used in this research either exhibit very high rates of error; are systematically correlated with pre-pandemics determinants of the effect of interest; or are a poorly chosen estimand for testing the causal chain of interest. Additionally, even though pandemics have wide-ranging impacts on society, many existing studies do not attempt to rule out plausible alternate channels linking the pandemic to the effect of interest. Each of these four methodological problems can produce false negative results, false positive results, and false positive results of the incorrect sign. We illustrate the extent of these problems using a series of helpful case studies from the 1918 context. In doing so, we make methodological contributions that stress the importance for causal research on pandemic of conducting sensitivity analyses on the calculation of excess mortality, accounting for omitted variable and collider bias, and measuring pandemic severity for the most theoretically appropriate time period and point-of-view.
Biography: Hampton Gaddy is a PhD researcher in demography and economic history at the London School of Economics and an affiliate at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. He works primarily on the 1918 influenza pandemic, the determinants of its mortality, and its social consequences.