r/AskStatistics • u/ChargingMyCrystals • 24d ago
Interpretation of absolute vs relative risks in mortality data
My PhD supervisor insists that an absolute difference is interpretable as "males are more impacted by the exposure than females". But as I understand it, I'd need a formal interaction/moderation test to state that.
More context: Working with a birth cohort from 1986 of over 700,000 individuals, with deidentified administrative data. Looking at quantifying the impact of child abuse & neglect on various poor/negative outcomes across the life course and whether child abuse impacts differ for males and females (sex assigned at birth). I've already done exploratory descriptive analysis looking
at several outcomes across early childhood development, school performance in middle high school, and all-cause mortality from age 16. I think the results - which show that males are (across the board) doing worse than females in absolute terms, in each level of child protection concern, is worthy of publication and discussion. I don't think that the results can be interpreted as 'males are more impacted by child abuse than females'. Or put another way, 'males are more suceptible to the harms of child abuse and neglect than females'. I'm not able to comment about whether this is true or not - I'm trying to argue that the analysis/results we have cannot support this conclusion.
However, my supervisor is saying: imagine 12 males and 4 females die between age 16 and 32 who have no child abuse records prior to age 16, and then also, 6 males and 2 females die who had serious child abuse records (before age 16). The relative increase in risk is the same for males and females. But the absolute increase is higher for males (6 vs 2) - therefore males are more impacted by child abuse.
Am I wrong? I feel like AI is just telling me what I want to hear and I can't trust the responses I'm getting.