Geographic Threats to Validity in Chakraborty’s Study

One geographic threat to validity for our Chakraborty reproduction study includes spatial heterogeneity; there are distinct areas where the pandemic spread early on as opposed to later, once it had spread widely throughout the entire country. By nature, our reproduction will mitigate this issue because we will be reproducing the study at a later date (2020 instead of 2018), after the pandemic had spread widely throughout the United States.

Another potential threat to validity would include scale dependency, which refers to the idea of a phenomena in one place being influenced by neighboring locations. Chakraborty was interested in the relationship between disabilities and the spread of COVID-19, however, it is likely that the spread of COVID-19 was not entirely dependent on disability, but rather in part physical proximity of places. This is to say that nearby places likely transmitted COVID-19 between them than places further apart.

References

Chakraborty, J. 2021. Social inequities in the distribution of COVID-19: An intra-categorical analysis of people with disabilities in the U.S. Disability and Health Journal 14 (1):101007. DOI: 10.1016/j.dhjo.2020.101007.