Identification and Estimation of Causal Mechanisms in Clustered Encouragement Designs: Disentangling Bed Nets using Bayesian Principal Stratification.

ABSTRACT: Exploration of causal mechanisms is often important for researchers and policymakers to understand how an intervention works and how it can be improved. This task can be crucial in clustered encouragement designs (CED). Encouragement design studies arise frequently when the treatment cannot be enforced because of ethical or practical constrains and an encouragement intervention (information campaigns, incentives, etc) is conceived with the purpose of increasing the uptake of the treatment of interest. By design, encouragements always entail the complication of non-compliance. Encouragements can also give rise to a variety of mechanisms, particularly when encouragement is assigned at cluster level. Social interactions among units within the same cluster can result in spillover effects. Dise

SUBMITTER: Forastiere L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5166715 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature