CRIM 220 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Statistical Significance, Causal Inference, Observational Error
20 Mar 2018
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Criminology 220: causality and validity lecture 3 (jan. 22) Causation in social sciences: x y. Video games: kids who are delinquent spend time playing video games, no omitted explanations: Video games and delinquency: you can say that delinquency causes playing video games, however you can also say that delinquency. And video games are being caused due to something, such as delinquent peers. Validity: validity is whether statements about cause or measures are correct, difficult to know with absolute certainty, think of threats to validity. In comparison, if you have a larger sample size it is easier to detect a relationship. Are we measuring what we think we"re measuring: threats due to, mismatch between construct & measurement, measures too narrow to generalize to theoretical processes. Scientific realism: an approach of combining idiographic and nomothetic explanations by explaining how causal mechanisms operate in specific contexts.
