Social Magnifier: Empirical Assessment of Selection Bias by Unequal Participation in Health Research
Name of applicant
Katrine Strandberg-Larsen
Title
Professor
Institution
University of Copenhagen
Amount
DKK 12,993,821
Year
2025
Type of grant
Semper Ardens: Accomplish
What?
Health research often includes healthier, wealthier people, which can distort findings. Using Danish register and cohort data we will apply and develop advanced methods to measure how nonrandom participation affects our understanding of health inequalities, using eating disorders with undiagnosed cases from self-reports, as proof-of-concept and building tools to correct bias across studies.
Why?
Most research lack data on those who do not participate. The Danish registers provide identical data on participants and nonparticipants. This provides an underused opportunity to quantify and correct bias from the socially inequal participation in research, that gets more extreme with long-term follow-up and likely hides real social disparities – not only in health research.
How?
We exploit that research participants are part of a larger population covered by national registers. This allows us to compare participants and nonparticipants on key factors, including diagnoses. We know that correcting for selection bias in social disparities of eating disorders matters and want to refine and apply advanced methods to correct for selection bias in studies of social inequality.