Quantitative sociology and causal inference: Understanding society using observational data

Abstract

Although statistical causal inference has become one of the major methods in quantitative research, systematic discussions of the meaning and impacts of it on quantitative sociology has not yet been found. In this paper, models of causal inference and related estimation methods are organized via the concept of heterogeneity. Above this arrangement, it is discussed, by using the sociological application of the multilevel analysis as a demonstration, that quantitative sociology has a tendency to treat heterogeneity in a different way from other quantitative research fields. As the conclusion, it is argued that there is a substantive difference between the approach of causal inference, which uses intervention or discontinuity from social processes, and that of the quantitative sociology, which usually refers to ordinary conceptual association in explaining social processes.