The 20th Annual David B. Larson Memorial Lecture will be held Monday, March 28, 2022. The speaker will be Tyler VanderWeele, Ph.D., the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Director of the Human Flourishing Program and Co-Director of the Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality at Harvard University. The title, location and time of the lecture are listed below. All are welcome and no reservation is required. Contact Dr. Koenig (Harold.Koenig@duke.edu) for more information.
OUTCOME-WIDE STUDIES, RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES, AND HUMAN FLOURISHING
Monday, March 28, 2022
5:30 – 6:30PM (in-person)
Duke University Hospital North, Rm 2001
Presented by: Tyler VanderWeele, Ph.D.
Brief Summary: Over the past decades increasingly rigorous research has demonstrated important relationships between participation in religious communities and health outcomes. For some outcomes, such as all-cause mortality and depression, the evidence for a protective causal relationship is now well established. However, for numerous other outcomes, and especially for well-being outcomes, more rigorous evidence is needed. Such evidence often accumulates slowly over time. However, when longitudinal data is available from large cohort studies, it will often be possible to more rapidly expand the evidence base by examining numerous outcomes simultaneously. So-called “outcome-wide designs” are put forward as an important study design template for more quickly and substantially expanding the evidence base for the relationships between religious community participation and numerous aspects of human flourishing. The approach is illustrated with analyses from the Growing Up Today Study, the Nurses’ Health Study, and the Polish Household Panel Study, and the Health and Retirement Study.
Tyler VanderWeele, Ph.D., is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Director of the Human Flourishing Program and Co-Director of the Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality at Harvard University. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University in mathematics, philosophy, theology, finance, and biostatistics (PhD from Harvard). His methodological research is focused on theory and methods for distinguishing between association and causation in the biomedical and social sciences and, more recently, on psychosocial measurement theory. His empirical research spans psychiatric and social epidemiology; the science of happiness and flourishing; and the study of religion and health. He is the recipient of the 2017 Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS). He has published over three hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals; is author of the books Explanation in Causal Inference (2015), Modern Epidemiology (2021), and Measuring Well-Being (2021); and he also writes a monthly blog posting on topics related to human flourishing for Psychology Today.
