Structural Modelling, Exogeneity, and Causality

Abstract

Whilst it might seem uncontroversial that the health sciences search for causes – that is, for causes of disease and for effective treatments – the causal perspective is less obvious in social science research, perhaps because it is apparently harder to glean general laws in the social sciences than in other sciences, due the probabilistic character of human behaviour. Thus the search for causes in the social sciences is often perceived to be a vain enterprise and it is often thought that social studies merely describe the phenomena.