Throughout human history, causal knowledge has been highly valued by laymen and
scientists alike. To be sure, both the nature of the causal relation and the conditions under …

The words cause and causal are often used by social scientists. In using these words, most
social scientists seek to distinguish causation from association, recognizing that causes are …

Sociologists routinely employ regression analysis and a variety of related statistical models
to draw causal inferences from survey data. Typically, the parameters of the models are …

Sociologists are increasingly attentive to the mechanisms responsible for cause-and-effect
relationships in the social world. But an aspect of mechanistic causality has not been …

In 1972, the birth year of Social Science Research (SSR), Structural Equation Modeling
(SEM) was experiencing a decade-long rebirth, moving from its origins in genetics to the …

This paper is about the logic of interpreting recursive causal theories in sociology. We
review the distinction between associations and effects and discuss the decomposition of …

While I find myself in close agreement with much of what Freedman has to say about much
of the empirical research using regression-type analyses, I find his comments contain …

The visibility of causal terminology in American sociology, from 1895 to the 1960s, has
varied according to changing philosophies of science and patterns of scientific …

Causality was at the center of the early history of structural equation models (SEMs) which
continue to serve as the most popular approach to causal analysis in the social sciences …

The author is grateful to Arthur S. Goldberger, Otis Dudley Duncan, and George Bohrnstedt
for helpful comments concerning earlier papers on this topic. They share no responsibility for …