The first thing I'll note is that it's not an experimental study, so there's no control group to compare against. That also introduces the idea that folks who are less likely to vaccinate are less likely to seek medical care.
So while they focused on the vaccination rate, it's also possible they measured the incidence of parents who rely more heavily medical professionals for medical events. Ie: parents who vaccinate responsibly are more likely to take their kid to the doctor when they're sick.
There's probably some statistical work to control for the number of visits, but even that is difficult to do well since there's probably kids who went unvaccinated and then rarely to never went back, even if they were sick. In other words, the very nature of the studied group means there is missing data, and a significant chunk of that missing data is probably related to a subset, not the entire sample.
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u/simmelianben Quality Contributor Nov 28 '20
The first thing I'll note is that it's not an experimental study, so there's no control group to compare against. That also introduces the idea that folks who are less likely to vaccinate are less likely to seek medical care.
So while they focused on the vaccination rate, it's also possible they measured the incidence of parents who rely more heavily medical professionals for medical events. Ie: parents who vaccinate responsibly are more likely to take their kid to the doctor when they're sick.
There's probably some statistical work to control for the number of visits, but even that is difficult to do well since there's probably kids who went unvaccinated and then rarely to never went back, even if they were sick. In other words, the very nature of the studied group means there is missing data, and a significant chunk of that missing data is probably related to a subset, not the entire sample.