📚 Factor labels: specific

Pages in this section:

All sections:

When you are creating factor labels for re-use across different causal claims, you should usually take care to keep them specific: make them no more general than they need to be.

So if you are coding cases where a household has increased income, use a label like Increased household income, not Increased income or even Economic improvement.

This is especially important when using hierarchical factors, when it’s easy to fall into the temptation of creating very general top-level labels like Economic improvement even if all your material is actually only about increased income in households and farms.