Social sciences workshop for young scientists

Last Friday (12 April), Professor Michael Becker held the workshop "Experiments, quasi-experiments, and causality in social sciences: basic principles" as an open offer for early career researchers at TU Dortmund University. The event is part of the programme of the IFS advanced curriculum and serves to impart an understanding of methods.

In terms of content, it was about whether and how causal answers can be found to questions such as whether higher school education leads to better health or whether attending grammar school influences intelligence performance. Questions such as these, in which one can only work experimentally to a limited extent, have long challenged the social sciences. It is controversial how such causal questions can be answered with observational data and without experimental manipulation. The event discussed the differences between experiments and observational studies using Rubin's Causal Model (RCM). The aim of the workshop was to learn to better understand and describe causal-analytical designs.

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