SERious EPI

Ask yourself these true or false questions: Generalizability and transportability and external validity are all the same thing Generalizability is a secondary concern to internal validity We spend too much time in epi training programs teaching internal validity and not enough teaching external validity Worrying about external validity is largely and academic exercise that doesn’t really have much...

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 mat...

Perhaps the biggest challenge we all face in epidemiologic research is recruitment of study participants. And recruiting a diverse population for our studies that allows for broad generalizability and transportability of effect estimates is something we haven’t done a good enough job of and as a consequence, our work has suffered. While we may think of this as not a methods issue, Dr. Jonathan Jac...

Do you, like us, understand that competing risks are important to account for and yet are not 100% sure exactly what they are and when they matter? Do you stay up at night wondering if competing risks regressions are necessary for valid inference in your study? If so, this episode is for you. Dr. Bryan Lau gives us the details on this important method. After listening to this podcast, if you’re in...

What are instrumental variables? Should I be using them in my research? And if so, how do I do that? In this episode of SERious Epidemiology, we talk with Dr. Sonja Swanson about what instrumental variables are and what’s so great (and not so great) about them. After listening to this podcast, if you’re interested in learning more about some of the topics we discussed, here are links for you to ch...

In honor of the Society for Epidemiologic Research 2020 Meeting, the hosts of four epidemiology podcasts came together to record the first ever “crossover event” to talk about their experiences recording our shows and what podcasting can bring to the table for the field of epidemiology. Join the hosts of Epidemiology Counts (Bryan James), SERiousEPi (Matt Fox, Hailey Banack), Casual Inference (Luc...

Episode Title: The need for theory in epidemiology with Dr. Nancy Krieger This episode features an interview with Dr. Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and author of Epidemiology and the People’s Health: Theory and Context . Dr. Krieger discusses the importance of using conceptual frameworks to improve people’s health and the role of populatio...

What puts the quasi in quasi-experimental designs? What makes a quasi-experimental study different than a “real” experiment? Ever wondered about the difference between regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences, and synthetic control methods? Dr. Tarik Benmarnhia joins us on this episode of SERious Epidemiology to talk us through a range of quasi-experimental designs. He makes a strong ca...

In most introductory epidemiology courses, students are taught about three categories of bias: confounding, information bias, and selection bias. On this episode of the podcast, we talk to Dr. Elizabeth Rose Mayeda about where collider stratification bias fits in to the framework of biases in epidemiology. Is collider stratification bias the same as selection bias? Why is collider bias so hard to...

Given the COVID-19 pandemic there is an urgent need for us to better understand how scientific evidence generated in epidemiologic research gets translated into information that can be used to create public health policy. In this episode of SERious Epidemiology, we talk with Dr. Laura Rosella about data driven public health, the role of epidemiology in public health, and more broadly, the importan...

In this episode we interview Dr. Ghassan Hamra and talk about all things Bayesian. If you’re like us, you have likely been trained in traditional, frequentist approaches to statistics and have always wondered what the big deal is about Bayesian approaches. Well, have no fear, Dr. Hamra is here to explain it all. In this episode we cover a range of topics introducing Bayesian analyses, including ho...

Why is it so important to ask good study questions? Why is it so hard to develop good study questions? Do all study questions need to be directly relevant for public health policy?  In this episode of SERious Epidemiology, we talk with Dr. Maria Glymour about what it means to ask a good study question and how we can get better at asking questions that will make a meaningful contribution to public...

Is all epidemiology social epidemiology? If I am someone who studies cancer, or obesity, or infectious disease, or any other branch of epidemiology, should I be considering topics related to social epidemiology in my own work? In this episode of SERious Epidemiology, Dr. Whitney Robinson joins us to explain key concepts in social epidemiology. After listening to this podcast, if you are interested...

In this journal club episode, we discuss one of our top 10 favourite epidemiology papers: “Does obesity shorten life? The importance of well-defined interventions to answer causal questions” by Miguel Hernán and Sarah Taubman. We talk about the consistency assumption in causal inference, why we think measurement error needs to be added to the list of assumptions for causal inference, and invent a...

Causal inference and the potential outcomes model are now both commonly taught in graduate programs in epidemiology. However, I think we can all agree that counterfactual thinking can be a bit mind-bending at times and it is really easy to get lost deep in the weeds when trying to think through the potential for unobserved comparison groups or outcomes. In this episode of SERious Epi, we speak to...

At SER 2019, the Cassel lecture was delivered by Miguel Hernán and Sandro Galea on the topic of  reconciling social epidemiology and causal inference. Their talk was turned into a paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology, and in March 2020, was published along with a series of responses by Drs. Enrique Schisterman, Whitney Robinson and Zinzi Bailey, Tyler VanderWeele, and John Jackson and Ony...

Have you ever wondered why it is so important to consider the concept of time in epidemiologic analyses? And, more importantly, what strategies exist to appropriately account for time and time-varying variables? Time dependent confounding? In the first-ever episode of SERious Epidemiology, Dr. Eleanor Murray will be discussing the concept of time in epidemiologic research and explaining different...

Do you want to know more about novel methods in epidemiology but don’t have the time read a bunch of papers on the topic? Do you want to keep current on the latest developments but can’t go back to school for another degree? Do you just want the big picture understanding so you can follow along? SERious EPI is a new podcast from the Society for Epidemiologic Research hosted by Hailey Banack and Ma...