{"id":19,"date":"2000-12-01T00:00:58","date_gmt":"2000-12-01T07:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mii.ucla.edu\/causality\/?p=28"},"modified":"2000-12-01T00:00:58","modified_gmt":"2000-12-01T07:00:58","slug":"the-causal-interpretation-of-structural-coefficients","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2000\/12\/01\/the-causal-interpretation-of-structural-coefficients\/","title":{"rendered":"The causal interpretation of structural coefficients"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font><strong>From L. H., University of Alberta and S.M., Georgia Tech&nbsp; <\/strong><\/font> <\/p>\n<p><font> In response to my comments (e.g., <em>Causality,<\/em> Section 5.4) that the causal interpretation of structural coefficients is practically unknown among SEM researchers, and my more recent comment that a correct causal interpretation is conspicuously absent from <em>all<\/em> SEM books   and papers, including <em>all<\/em> 1970-1999 texts in economics, two readers wrote that the &quot;unit-change&quot; interpretation is common and well accepted in the SEM literature. <\/font><\/p>\n<p> <font><\/font> <\/p>\n<p><font>L.H. from the University of Alberta wrote:<br \/> &quot;Page 245 of L. Hayduk, Structural Equation Modeling   with LISREL: Essentials and Advances, 1986, has a chapter headed  &quot;Interpreting it All&quot;, whose first section is titled &quot;The basics  of interpretation,&quot; whose first paragraph, has a second sentence  which says in italics  (with notation changed to correspond to the  above) that a slope can be interpreted as: the magnitude of the  change in <em>y<\/em> that would be predicted to accompany a unit change  in <em>x<\/em> with the other variables in the equation left untouched at their original values.&quot; &#8230;   &quot;Seems to me that  O.D. Duncan, Introduction to Structural  Equation Models 1975 pages 1 and 2 are pretty clear on <em>b<\/em> as causal.  &quot;More precisely, it [<em>byx<\/em>] says that a change of one unit in <em>x<\/em> &#8230;  produces a change of <em>b<\/em> units in <em>y<\/em>&quot; (page 2).  I suspect  that H. M. Blalock&#39;s book &quot;Causal models in the social Sciences&quot;,  and D. Heise&#39;s book &quot;Causal analysis.&quot; probably speak of <em>b<\/em> as causal.&quot;   <\/font><\/p>\n<p><font>S.M., from Georgia Tech concurs:<br \/> &quot;I concur with L.H. that Heise, author of Causal Analysis (1975) regarded the <em>b<\/em> of causal equations to be how much a unit change in a cause produced an effect in an effect variable.  This is a well-accepted idea.&quot;    <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From L. H., University of Alberta and S.M., Georgia Tech&nbsp; In response to my comments (e.g., Causality, Section 5.4) that the causal interpretation of structural coefficients is practically unknown among SEM researchers, and my more recent comment that a correct causal interpretation is conspicuously absent from all SEM books and papers, including all 1970-1999 texts [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-j-pearl","category-structural-equations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/causality.cs.ucla.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}