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Agree, wildlife & wilderness is great, but my guess is that there's a confounding factor such as wealth, population density, etc. that has more of an impact on
by nxzero 10y ago
Agree, wildlife & wilderness is great, but my guess is that there's a confounding factor such as wealth, population density, etc. that has more of an impact on health than trees.
Personally, tree are exciting to me, not calming.
- abrookewood 10y agoWhat about the evidence of earlier discharge at the same hospital? It wasn't clear how carefully that was evaluated, but surely that would nullify wealth, population density etc since the only difference was the room that people were put in.
- thom 10y agoHow do they decide what room to put people in?
- nxzero 10y agoFirst, just to be clear, issue at hand is the title, which states trees CAUSE calmness which CAUSES health. All the research shows is there's a link between trees and health; aka there's a correlation, not causation. Best example I'm aware of of "confounding factor" is that there's an obvious correlation between an increase in people drowning in pools and ice cream consumption rates. Eating ice cream does not cause drowning, nor do drownings cause people to eat ice cream. Hot weather causes people to swim more, which increases the odds someone will drown. All I'm saying is this research does not show causation or look for confounding factors, which might show the correlation itself is a false positive.
- boxy310 10y agoThis is why studying marginal effects -- like when the Emerald Ash Borer invaded county-by-county and caused a discrete time-series event that you can analyze before-and-after, as mentioned in the article -- is so critical.
- abrookewood 10y agoAh cool - misunderstood you.
- frankquist 10y agoThe study accounted for both income and area income. So while there may be a confounding factor, I assume wealth is out of the picture. It doesn't seem to have accounted for population density however.