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Synthetic Controls

Event information

Location: Online

Date: 18 July 2023

Working group: Social Care

NIHR SSCR Social Care Statistics Webinar

NIHR SSCR’s Webinar Series showcases the School’s commissioned research and capacity-building activities. The Series also aims to showcase relevant social care research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

Webinar materials

The NIHR SSCR Social Care Statistics Working Group presented this webinar on synthetic controls by Dr Gintare Malisauskaite, Research Associate at the Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent.

Synthetic controls

The synthetic control method is a statistical method used to evaluate the effect of a specific treatment in comparative case studies. It involves a construction of a synthetic control unit based on a weighted combination of control units, that were not subject to the treatment, to which the treatment group is compared.

Webinar structure

The webinar gave a broad overview of synthetic control method use in practice. This included a description and an explanation of the method, some advice on running this analysis on Stata, short discussion of examples from the literature and own work experience, and an overview of strengths and limitations of this method.

Following Dr Malisauskaite’s presentation, small group discussions were held to discuss questions relevant to synthetic controls and more broadly related to using statistics in social care research.

Following feedback from the group discussions, delegates discussed topics for future such webinars.

The session concluded with a brief overview of the Catalogue of Social Care Data presented by Edmund Stubbs.