Adjustment changes the slope
How much of the smoking association remains with four covariates held fixed?
- County
- Naive fit
- Adjusted fit, 95% band
Dashed: naive slope -0.63 years/pp. Solid: adjusted slope -0.305 years/pp.
The band is uncertainty in a conditional mean, not a prediction interval for an individual county. Adjustment changes the association; it does not prove causation. Both lines are the source model's supplied values, not refitted here.
Chart data · 41 rows
| Smoking (%) | Conditional mean | Lower 95% | Upper 95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 | 79.46 | 79.06 | 79.87 |
| 7.9 | 79.19 | 78.82 | 79.56 |
| 8.8 | 78.92 | 78.57 | 79.26 |
| 9.7 | 78.64 | 78.33 | 78.96 |
| 10.6 | 78.37 | 78.08 | 78.65 |
| 11.5 | 78.09 | 77.84 | 78.35 |
| 12.4 | 77.82 | 77.59 | 78.05 |
| 13.3 | 77.54 | 77.34 | 77.74 |
| 14.2 | 77.27 | 77.1 | 77.44 |
| 15.1 | 77 | 76.85 | 77.14 |
| 16 | 76.72 | 76.6 | 76.84 |
| 16.9 | 76.45 | 76.35 | 76.55 |
| 17.8 | 76.17 | 76.09 | 76.26 |
| 18.7 | 75.9 | 75.82 | 75.97 |
| 19.6 | 75.62 | 75.55 | 75.7 |
| 20.5 | 75.35 | 75.26 | 75.44 |
| 21.4 | 75.08 | 74.96 | 75.19 |
| 22.3 | 74.8 | 74.67 | 74.94 |
| 23.2 | 74.53 | 74.37 | 74.69 |
| 24.1 | 74.25 | 74.06 | 74.44 |
The same model as Fig. 11.1. Gray dots: adult smoking (v009) against life expectancy (v147). Solid line: the model’s prediction as smoking varies with obesity, income, education and diabetes held at their means; band is ±1.96 standard errors of that conditional mean (σ²v′(X′X)⁻¹v). Dashed line: the naive one-variable least-squares fit.
County Health Rankings & Roadmaps 2024, UW Population Health Institute · CDC PLACES: Local Data for Better Health, County Data, 2025 release (data.cdc.gov swc5-untb)
Reading notes
The band describes a conditional mean, not individual prediction. Adjustment alone does not establish causality.
Source & method
Unchanged public figure capture; original meta.sources, derivation and verification checks retained. No model refitting or fabricated uncertainty.
Capture provenance
- Source repository / file
- picturing-american-health / public/figdata/f1102-marginal.json
- Revision
- e13698bac543141b21d62cb9d5c7dddc99aef834
- Captured
- 2026-09-11
- Source SHA-256
- 81879e3cecd47134c8cd1dcda519270f8327c5202120d4aec276a06f3cc74094
- Reuse note
- Aggregated public-facing example from the user-owned source repository. Upstream attribution retained; no new license asserted.
