Propensity Score Analysis
Statistical Methods and Applications
Fully updated to reflect the most recent changes in the field, the Second Edition of Propensity Score Analysis provides an accessible, systematic review of the origins, history, and statistical foundations of propensity score analysis, illustrating how it can be used for solving evaluation and causal-inference problems. With a strong focus on practical applications, the authors explore various strategies for employing PSA, discuss the use of PSA with alternative types of data, and delineate the limitations of PSA under a variety of constraints. Unlike existing textbooks on program evaluation and causal inference, this book delves into statistical concepts, formulas, and models within the context of a robust and engaging focus on application.
Supplements
The site contains programming syntax for all the examples found in the book, by chapter and section.
Over the past 35 years, methods of program evaluation have undergone a significant change, and the researchers have recognized the need to develop more efficient approaches for assessing treatment effects from studies based on observational data and for evaluations based on quasi-experimental designs.
Written by experts, this volume is updated and fully reflects the current changes to the field. It offers a systematic review of the history, origins, and statistical foundations of propensity score analysis, and more.
The most significant change of the second edition is discussion of propensity score subclassification, propensity score weighting, and dosage analysis from Chapter 5 to separate chapters. These methods are closely related to the Rosenbaum and Rubin’s (1983) seminal study of the development of propensity scores—it is for this reason that Chapter 5 of the first edition pooled these methods together. Because subclassification and weighting methods have been widely applied in recent research and have become recommended models for addressing challenging data issues (Imbens & Wooldridge, 2009), we decided to give each topic a separate treatment. There is an increasing need in social behavioral and health research to model treatment dosage and to extend the propensity score approach from the binary treatment conditions context to categorical and/or continuous treatment conditions contexts. Given these considerations, we treated dosage analysis in the second edition as a separate chapter. As a result, Chapter 5 now focuses on propensity score matching methods alone, including greedy matching and optimal matching.