Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research (Analytical Methods for Social Research)

by Stephen L. Morgan

Stouffer’s method was to conceive of the experiment that he wished he could have conducted and then to work backwards by stratifying a sample of the population of interest into subgroups until he felt comfortable that the remaining differences in the outcome could no longer be easily attributed to systematic differences within the subgroups.

“path analysis focuses on the problem of interpretation and does not purport to be a method for discovering causes,”