Social epidemiology seeks to describe and quantify the causal effects of social institutions, interactions, and structures on human health. To accomplish this task, we define exposures as treatments and posit populations exposed or unexposed to these well-defined regimens. This inferential structure allows us to unambiguously estimate and interpret quantitative causal parameters and to investigate how these may be affected by biases such as confounding. This paradigm has been challenged recently by some critics who favor broadening the exposures that may be studied beyond treatments to also consider states. Defining the exposure protocol of an observational study is a continuum of specificity, and one may choose to loosen this definition, incurring the cost of causal parameters that become commensurately more vague. The advantages and disadvantages of broader versus narrower definitions of exposure are matters of continuing debate in social epidemiology as in other branches of epidemiology.

中文翻译：

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评论：社会接触的因果推论。

社会流行病学试图描述和量化社会制度，相互作用和结构对人类健康的因果影响。为了完成此任务，我们将暴露定义为暴露于或未暴露于这些明确定义的治疗方案的治疗和假定人群。这种推论结构使我们能够明确地估计和解释定量因果参数，并研究这些因果参数可能如何受到诸如混杂之类的偏见的影响。这种范式最近受到一些批评家的挑战，他们主张扩大可能在研究之外也要考虑国家的研究范围。定义观察性研究的暴露方案是特异性的连续统一体，人们可能会选择放松这一定义，从而导致因果参数的成本变得更加模糊。