Case study – a basic causal analysis in R

Let’s dive into a practical example from causal inference using R. Our objective is to evaluate the effect of attending Catholic schools on students’ standardized math scores. The challenge here is that our dataset is observational, meaning there’s a risk of selection bias. This bias arises when the differences in outcomes (such as educational achievement) between students from Catholic and public schools are due to pre-existing characteristics, not just the school type.

The dataset [7] includes information on student demographics (mother’s age, family income, and number of residences) and educational background (mother’s education level and whether the student attended a Catholic or public school). The key variables we’re interested in are whether a student attended a Catholic school (catholic) and their standardized math scores (c5r2mtsc_std). This example highlights how to tackle potential...