The within-person (or intra-individual or within‐individual or ...), design is a longitudinal design where we follow people over time as they change on some purported cause, and look at whether the purported effect also varies accordingly. This simple design is surprisingly underused despite having the strong advantage that it controls by design for both genetic causes (except for new mutations such as in cancers) and for stable environmental causes such as childhood upbringing or parental education levels. Since most confounding in social science is from these sources, probably, this design theoretically provides a close approximation of causality if one can study a given research question in this fashion (
The within-person design: a selective review
The within-person design: a selective review
The within-person design: a selective review
The within-person (or intra-individual or within‐individual or ...), design is a longitudinal design where we follow people over time as they change on some purported cause, and look at whether the purported effect also varies accordingly. This simple design is surprisingly underused despite having the strong advantage that it controls by design for both genetic causes (except for new mutations such as in cancers) and for stable environmental causes such as childhood upbringing or parental education levels. Since most confounding in social science is from these sources, probably, this design theoretically provides a close approximation of causality if one can study a given research question in this fashion (