Abstract
The complexity of actual cause and effect relationships in social life can lead quickly to confused thinking and muddled discussions. Helpful here are distinctions that allow one to speak about some causes as different from others. Our chapter describes several distinctions among causes that we find especially useful for social science. First, taking a broad view of what “causes” are, we discuss some issues concerning whether causes are manipulable or preventable. Then, we consider the distinction between proximal and distal causes, connecting these to concepts of mediation and indirect effects. Next, we propose ways that concepts related to the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes in case-oriented research may be also useful for quantitative research on large samples. Afterward, we discuss criteria for characterizing one cause as more important than another. Finally, we describe ultimate and fundamental causes, which do not concern the relationship between an explanatory variable and outcome so much as the causes of properties of the systems in which more concrete causal relationships exist.
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Notes
- 1.
There is a specific sense to the legal use of the term “proximate cause” that we leave outside the scope of this chapter.
- 2.
By “population level” here, we mean statements intended to apply to multiple cases rather than statements about the causes of an outcome for a single case. This is sometimes referred to as the distinction between singular causes and general causes (e.g., Pearl 2009: 253–256).
- 3.
A key philosophical issue that recurs in discussing the relationship between case- and population-oriented approaches concerns the extent to which outcomes for individual cases are truly probabilistic versus the apparently probabilism simply reflecting inadequate information (Mahoney 2008; Lieberson 1991).
- 4.
The exceptions are if the distal cause entirely determines the more proximate cause or if the distal cause is strictly mediated by the more proximate cause. In the former scenario, the total causal effect of the distal cause must be at least as large as the total effect of the proximate cause, whereas in the latter scenario, the reverse is true.
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Freese, J., Kevern, J.A. (2013). Types of Causes. In: Morgan, S. (eds) Handbook of Causal Analysis for Social Research. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6094-3_3
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