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Confounding and Control

The paper deals both with the issues of confounding and of control, as the definition of a confounding factor is far from universal and there exist different methodological approaches, ex ante and ex post, for controlling for a confounder. In the first section it compares some definitions of a confounder given in epidemiological textbooks with the definition of a confounder as a common cause of both treatment/exposure and outcome. In the second section, the paper examines confounder control from the data collection viewpoint, recalls the stratification approach for ex post control, and shows that standardisation fails under conditions of strong interaction. The paper finally raises the issue of controlling for a common cause or for intervening variables.

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