Studying mechanisms to strengthen causal inferences in quantitative research
نویسنده
چکیده
Let me emphasize at the outset that as the terms are being used here, causal inference is not the same as statistical inference. The two types of inference are similar in that they both use “localized” information to draw conclusions about more general phenomena; however the types of phenomena about which one seeks to generalize are not the same and the types of information used also often differ. In statistical inference, one typically uses information obtained from a limited number of observations—usually based on a random sample—to draw conclusions about the likely value of some parameter in the population at large such as a regression coefficient or a standard deviation. In
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