E Rua Ngā Tūru – Attributing causation in Whānau Ora

This presentation explores how causal inferences can be drawn from a ‘natural experiment’, like Whānau Ora. I talk generally about health interventions and a little about the Whānau Ora initiative, and how we might evaluate the effectiveness of these interventions for Māori. I also talk about two chairs, to illustrate what a controlled experiment and what a natural experiment looks like. As Dr. Jane Davidson says, the real ‘gold standard’ of evaluating whether an intervention works as making sound, causal inferences based on whatever evidence we can collect for the audience you’re speaking to.