The central tenet of causal realism is a thesis about causal mechanisms or causal powers. We can only assert that there is a causal relationship between X and Y if we can offer a credible hypothesis of the sort of underlying mechanism that might connect X to the occurrence of Y. The sociologist Mats Ekström …
Policy, treatment, and mechanism
Policies are selected in order to bring about some desired social outcome or to prevent an undesired one. Medical treatments are applied in order to cure a disease or to ameliorate its effects. In each case an intervention is performed in the belief that this intervention will causally interact with a larger system in such …
What social science can do
Quite a few postings here emphasize the limits of social science knowledge. Prediction of the behavior of large social wholes is difficult to impossible. There are few strong regularities among social phenomena. Social entities and processes are heterogeneous, plastic, and path-dependent. So the question arises: what can the social sciences do that takes them beyond …
Safety as a social effect
Some organizations pose large safety issues for the public because of the technologies and processes they encompass. Industrial factories, chemical and nuclear plants, farms, mines, and aviation all represent sectors where safety issues are critically important because of the inherent risks of the processes they involve. However, "safety" is not primarily a technological characteristic; instead, …
What causes college success?
This sounds like a simple question. It sounds as if it is asking for us to discover a set of factors that influence the level of performance of individuals within a population when they get to colleges and universities. And we might speculate that there is a small group of potentially relevant factors: antecedent cognitive …
Are there discrete social mechanisms?
McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly direct our attention to the level of the concrete social mechanisms that recur in many instances of social contention (Dynamics of Contention). They specifically refer to escalation, radicalization, brokerage, and repression as examples of social mechanisms that produce the same effects in the same circumstances, and that concatenate into historical processes …
How does regional economic development work?
Countries, states, regions, and cities are interested in stimulating economic development in their jurisdictions. Various possible strategies are often mentioned: encourage entrepreneurship improve the talent base enhance the attractiveness of the region to outsiders with creative talents create a legal, fiscal, and regulatory environment that encourages new businesses create larger pools of venture capital attract …
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How can race be a cause of something like asthma?
Though I've posed this posting around the question of "race and asthma," the question here isn't really about public health. It is rather concerned with the general question, how can a group characteristic be a causal factor in enhancing some other group characteristic? Suppose the facts are these: that African-Americans have a higher probability of …
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Social "laws" and causal mechanisms
Are there social regularities? Is there anything like a "law of nature" that governs or describes social phenomena? My view is that this is a question that needs to be approached very carefully. As a bottom line, I take the view that there are no "social laws" analogous to "laws of nature", even though there …
Social causal explanations
To explain an outcome is to demonstrate what conditions combined to bring it about -- what caused the outcome in the circumstances, or caused it to be more likely to occur. The most fundamental aspect of an explanation is a hypothesis about what caused the circumstance we want to explain. So social explanation requires that …
Understanding Society 