Abstract
In a 2014 report on adolescent mental health outcomes in the Moving to Opportunityfor Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO), Kessler et al. reported that, at 10-to 15-year follow-up, boys from households randomized to an experimental housingvoucher intervention experienced 12-month prevalence of post-traumatic stressdisorder (PTSD) at several times the rate of boys from control households. We reanalyzethis finding here, bringing to light a PTSD outcome imputation procedure usedin the original analysis, but not described in the study report. By bootstrapping withrepeated draws from the frequentist sampling distribution of the imputation modelused by Kessler et al., and by varying two pseudorandom number generator seedsthat fed their analysis, we account for several purely statistical components of theuncertainty inherent in their imputation procedure. We also discuss other sourcesof uncertainty in this procedure that were not accessible to a formal reanalysis.
Highlights
The Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO) was a social experiment mandated by Congress, and conducted during the 1990’s
To avoid a “statistical fishing expedition”[15], we committed to limiting the scope and methods of our reanalysis to those discussed in an earlier communication (Nov 2014), which is basically recapitulated in points 1–4 above
Regarding as too weak Christakis and Zimmerman’s requirement that original authors “should be provided with the opportunity to review and comment on the reanalysis before its acceptance for publication”[15], we committed in this same communication to giving the original authors “access to all of our reanalysis code no later than our manuscript is submitted for peer review.” (Said access was provided on May 3, 2016.) to avoid publication bias, authors committed to “make all reasonable efforts to publish a manuscript describing our reanalysis findings regardless of the ‘significance level’ of the widened confidence intervals it yields.”
Summary
The Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO) was a social experiment mandated by Congress, and conducted during the 1990’s. From 1994 to 1998, 4,604 households residing in distressed inner-city housing in five U.S cities were randomized to three experimental groups. Adults and children in the MTO households were surveyed in 2001 and 2011 to assess a variety of economic and mental health outcomes. A 2003 MTO Interim Evaluation[1] (4–7 years after randomization) revealed an interesting interaction between gender and housing mobility, with respect to outcomes of delinquency and risky behavior: girls benefited, but boys did not. This finding, somewhat at odds with earlier research[2], spurred subsequent explanatory efforts[3,4,5,6]
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