One of the fabulous things about evaluation is that we are allowed to (or, rather, required to!) make causal claims from a wide variety of evidence, not only experiments. Causal estimands, defined in terms of potential outcomes, are the norm for quantitative impact evaluations. Causal DAGs are becoming more popular too and one of my favourite tools for thinking through quasi-experimental designs.
Not all fields have it so good.
Julia Rohrer has written a great blog post, following a series of journal papers, urging personality psychologists to be upfront with their causal claims. It’s challenging to persuade and I think interesting as a sociology of science case study. As Rohrer summarises, ‘Being vague about the desired interpretation may maintain some degree of plausible deniability and potentially offload the error to others (“oh, you shouldn’t have interpreted our numbers like that!1”). But honestly, that’s just a cowardly way to do science. Life is too short for that.’
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2024, August 30). Being brave with causal interpretations [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/being-brave-with-causal-interpretations/
This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀