Question

Discuss the criteria for nomothetic causality. Discuss the obstacles in the search for nomothetic causality. Illustrate your answer with examples

Answer 1

The three criteria for nomothetic causality are as follows:

• The variables must be correlated.
• The cause must take place before the effect.
• The effect cannot be explained in terms of a third variable.

The search for nomothetic causality is very challenging in social science research because often, the concepts that are studied are highly complex, and cannot be reduced to a specific set of relationships. For example, suppose we want to study the factors that improve academic performance among students. Even if we create the most robust experimental methods, we cannot clearly pin point which variable affects our study of interest and to what degree, as there are multiple factors impacting academic performance such as intelligence, hard work, student-teacher relationship, subject interest, and may more.