Causation in Psychological Research
The European Journal of Personality just published an article by James Lee, titled
“Correlation and Causation in the Study of Personality”
European Journal of Personality, Eur.J.Pers. 26: 372-390 (2012) DOI:10.1002/per.1863.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/per.1863/pdf,
or here.
Lee’s article is followed by Open Peer Commentaries
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/per.1865/full,
or here.
(Strikingly, the commentary by Rolf Steyer declares the do-operator to be self-contradictory. I trust readers of this blog to spot Steyer’s error right away. If not, I will post.)
Another recent paper on causation in psychological research is the one by Shadish and Sullivan,
“Theories of Causation in Psychological Science”
In Harris Cooper (Ed-in-Chief), APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology, Volume 1, pp. 23-52, 2012.
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~kaoru/shadish-sullivan12.pdf
While these papers indicate a healthy awakening of psychological researchers to recent advances in causal inference, the field is still dominated by authors who have not heard about model-based covariate selection, testable implications, nonparametric identification, bias amplification, mediation formulas and more.
Much to do, much to discuss,
Judea
Where is Rolf Steyer making this assumption of self-contradictory?
Best Regards, Clemens
Comment by Clemens — January 8, 2017 @ 12:28 am
Here: “Finally, the third answer is contradictory. Pearl’s own words are as follows: ‘These disturbance terms represent independent background factors that the investigator chooses not to include in the analysis’ (Pearl, 2009, p. 68).”
Comment by bryantc — January 8, 2017 @ 2:39 am