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Causation in Educational
Research
Keith Morrison
First published 2009
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2009 Keith Morrison
Typeset in Garamond by
Book Now, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Morrison, Keith (Keith R. B.)
Causation in educational research / Keith Morrison.
p. cm.
1. Education—Research. 2. Causation. I. Title.
LB1028.M665 2009
370.7′2—dc22 2008052127
List of figures xi
List of tables xiii
Preface xv
Acknowledgements xvii
3 Probabilistic causation 29
A worked example: small class teaching 30
Probability, prediction and regression 34
Can one really calculate the relative strength of causes? 39
Linear and non-linear relations of cause and effect 42
Conditional probability 45
Causes, events, states, processes and effects 47
Quasi-causation 51
Calculating probabilities 55
Screening off and causal forks 57
The ecological fallacy 62
Recursive and non-recursive models 63
viii Contents
Notes 215
References 217
Index 229
Figures
3.24 SPSS output for partial correlations, controlling for part-time work 95
3.25 Path analysis modelling with AMOS (AMOS output) 97
3.26 Path analysis with calculations added (AMOS output) 98
3.27 Cross-site analysis of qualitative data 101
3.28 Factors facilitating and impeding change in qualitative data 102
analysis
4.1 Different causal motives behind the same response 117
4.2 Same effect, many causes 117
4.3 Cause and effect of young people’s low attainment 121
4.4 Modelling causes and effects of low attainment in young people 124
5.1 Mathematics scores by age and sex 140
5.2 The ‘true’ experiment 144
5.3 A causal chain of many links 165
5.4 Initial causes and later effects 167
6.1 Two causes and two effects 181
6.2 Rival theories to explain a phenomenon 189
6.3 A model of determining causes from effects 195
6.4 The circular nature of causality 202
Tables
3.28 Do males score higher or lower marks in maths than females, and
why? 78
3.29 Comparative results of factors influencing mathematics scores 80
3.30 Smoking, heart disease and exercise 83
3.31 Socio-economic status, part-time work and class of degree 86
3.32 Probability of gaining a certain class of degree 86
3.33 Socio-economic status and class of degree 87
3.34 Part-time work and class of degree 87
3.35 A trivariate crosstabulation 88
3.36 Likelihood of obtaining a high-class degree 89
3.37 Likelihood of obtaining a low-class degree 89
3.38 Grouping data on socio-economic status, part-time work and
level of degree 92
3.39 Part-time work and class of degree, controlled for socio-economic
status (SPSS output) 93
5.1 Resources, student motivation and examination results 139
5.2 Two experimental and two control groups 145
5.3 Experimental results for control and experimental groups 145
6.1 An ex post facto experiment 180
Preface
This book addresses causation for educational researchers. Calls for understanding
‘what works’ in education are being made the world over. We need to know not
only ‘what works’ but also for whom, under what conditions, how and why, on what
criteria, why they work in the way that they do, and why some interventions do not
work. This places causation at centre stage. If educational practice is to advance then
we need to know ‘what causes what’, what are the effects of causes, and what are the
causes of effects. Why do things happen as they do?
The chapters here introduce and work with the fascinating debate on causation that
has been running for hundreds of years. The study of causation is not straightforward.
Causation is elusive; indeed, the further one goes into it, the more elusive it becomes.
A causal explanation slips through your fingers just when you think you have found it.
Simplistic ideas of ‘what causes what’ must be abandoned, and this is an important
message that must be sounded loud and long to policy makers and researchers. John
Locke’s simple statement that ‘a cause is that which makes any other thing, either sim-
ple idea, substance, or mode, begin to be; and an effect is that which had its beginning
from some other thing’ (Locke, 1997: 293) disguises the immense complexity of
causation.
This book provides an introduction to causation, sets out key debates, and, above all,
seeks to raise practical and theoretical matters, problems and their solutions in under-
standing causation. It is strongly practical in intent. If it makes researchers cautious of
having any sense of certainty at all about causation, then this small volume will have
done its work. We strive to understand causes and effects, but the task is not straight-
forward. At best we can make inferences and suggestions about causation, but that is
all. We do not have the perfect knowledge required for causation to be established. This
applies to those reading, using and doing research.
Writing this book has made me very sceptical of ever knowing ‘what causes what’,
but it has made me want to try harder to find out, rather than to give up. Instead of
the sometimes banal certainties of politicians, the careful researcher should have a large
helping of modesty and humility in claiming that she or he might know the effects of
causes or the causes of effects, and why things do or do not happen in the way that they
do. In that spirit of modesty I hope that this book offers practical advice to researchers
and those seeking to understand some limits of educational research and what can be
said from it.
Keith Morrison
Macau
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to my wife, who has brought happiness in my life that I cannot
express in words.
I owe an immeasurable debt to Professor Louis Cohen and our dear friend
Lawrence Manion for having had faith in me many years ago to support my writing.
My thanks are due to Taylor and Francis Books UK for permission to use the follow-
ing materials in this text: Cohen, L., Manion, L. and Morrison, K. R. B. (2007) Research
Methods in Education (6th edition), pp. 264, 274–5.
Chapter 1
The human mind is a wonderful analogue processor. It is the most sophisticated learn-
ing processor that we know. And it learns by telling stories for itself, stories of how
things are, how they came to be, what is really happening, what will happen next, and
why – in short, by thinking causally, filtering out the causally relevant from the
causally irrelevant. Parents will know both the joy and the frustration of that period of
their child’s life when he or she endlessly asks ‘why?’.
At the heart of learning and development lies causation: as Hume remarks in his
work An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding: ‘on this are founded all our reason-
ings concerning matter of fact or existence’ (Hume 1955: 87). Whether or not the
world itself develops and emerges through cause and effect is largely immaterial; in
order to avoid circularity, this book assumes that we think and we learn in part
through cause and effect. Causation is both an ontological and an epistemological
matter. This is unremarkable. However, how this happens is truly marvellous, for, as
this book will argue, it involves a sophisticated process of evaluation and filtering,
weighing up competing causal influences and judging exactly what each shows or
promises. Whether we simply impose our way of thinking – in terms of cause and
effect – on unrelated objects and events in order to understand them for ourselves,
regardless of the fact that such cause and effect may or may not exist ‘out there’ in the
objective world – i.e. that cause and effect is a theoretical construct used heuristically
for humans to understand their world – is debatable. Pace Wittgenstein, the limits of
our ways of thinking may define the limits of our world. The world may be disor-
dered, unrelated and, in terms of cause and effect, insubstantial, but it’s nearly all we
have; it’s all we can do in order to understand it.
Are we to believe Russell (1913: 1), who wrote that ‘the law of causality, I believe,
like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving,
like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm’, or Pearson
(1892), who considered causation to be a mere ‘fetish’ that should be overtaken by mea-
sures of correlation, or Pinker (2007: 209), who reports some philosophers as saying that
causation is as shoddy as the material used in Boston tunnels and should be kissed good-
bye, or Gorard (2001), who writes that ‘our notion of cause is little more than a super-
stition’? I think not. Maybe causation has little mileage for philosophers, but for social
scientists it is a fundamental way of understanding our world, and we have to engage it.
Indeed Pinker (2007: 219–20) shows how causation is deeply entrenched in our every-
day language, in such phrases as causing, preventing, moving in spite of a hindrance,
and keeping still despite being pushed.
2 The world of cause and effect
There are several reasons why understanding and using causation are important (e.g.
Lewis 1993; Salmon 1998: 3–10). For example, causation:
Understanding and using causation may not be straightforward. Indeed Glymour (1997:
202) argues that there is no settled definition of causation, but that it includes ‘some-
thing subjunctive’. Causation is a multi-dimensional and contested phenomenon.
Humeans would argue that temporality is a marker of causation: one event has to precede
or proceed from another in time for causation to obtain. Hume provides a double defi-
nition of causation (see his work A Treatise of Human Nature; Hume 2000: 1.3.14: 35):1
An object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resem-
bling the former are plac’d in a like relation of priority and contiguity to those
objects, that resemble the latter.
An object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it in the imag-
ination, that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other,
and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.
He adds to this in his Inquiry:
An object followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are fol-
lowed by objects similar to the second. Or, in other words, where, if the first object
had not been, the second had never existed.
(Hume 1955: 87)
The Humean model of priority and contiguity is represented in Figure 1.1. Note
that the boxes of cause and effect are joined (the ‘contiguity’ requirement) and touch
each other in time; there is no gap between the boxes and the arrow. Further, the cause
only ever precedes the effect (the ‘priority’ requirement).
These are starting points only – indeed, they conceal more that they reveal – and this
chapter will open up the definitions to greater scrutiny. Though Hume is concerned
with regularities, other views also have to do with inferences and probabilities, and this
opens the door to a range of issues in considering causation.
The world of cause and effect 3
Cause Effect
The arrow of time
A fundamental tenet from Hume’s disarmingly simple yet profound analysis is that
causation cannot be deduced by logic nor, indeed, can it be directly observed in experi-
ence (see also Fisher 1951; Holland 2004). Rather, it can only be inferred from the cumu-
lative and repeated experience of one event following another (his ‘constant conjunction’
principle, in which the individual learns that if one event is followed by another repeat-
edly then it can be inferred that there is a probability that the two may be connected).
This is questioned by Ducasse (1993), who argues that recurrence is not a necessary
requirement of causation, that it is irrelevant whether a cause-and-effect event happens
more than once, and that it only becomes relevant if one wishes to establish a causal law
(Hume’s ‘regularity of succession’). Indeed Holland (1986: 950) suggests that Hume’s
analysis misses the effect that other contiguous causes may have on an effect.
Our knowledge of causation is inductive and the uncertainty and unpredictability of
induction inhere in it. As a consequence, knowledge of causation is provisional, con-
jectural and refutable. It is learned from our memory – individual or collective – as well
as perhaps being deduced from logic or observation (see also Salmon 1998: 15). Indeed,
so strong is the inferential nature of causation that we can, at best, think in terms of
probabilistic causation rather than laws of causation. This is a major issue that under-
pins much of this book.
We have to step back and ask ‘What actually is a cause?’ and ‘What actually is an
effect?’: an event, a single action, a process, a linkage of events, a reason, a motive? One
feature of causation is its attempt to link two independent, in principle unrelated
events. ‘Minimal independence’ (Sosa and Tooley 1993: 7) is a fundamental requisite of
causation, or, as Hume remarks, every object has to be considered ‘in itself’, without
reference to the other, and ‘all events seem entirely loose and separate. One event fol-
lows another, but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined, but
never connected’ (Hume 1995: 85). Does X cause Y, when X and Y are independent enti-
ties? Does small class teaching improve student performance? Does extra homework
improve student motivation? The relationship is contingent, not analytic, i.e. the for-
mer, in itself, does not entail the latter, and vice versa; they are, in origin, unrelated.
Indeed, in rehearsing the argument that the cause must be logically distinct from its
effect, Davidson (2001: 13) argues that, if this is true, then it is to question whether
reasons can actually be causes, since the reason for an action is not logically distinct
from that action (see also Von Wright 1993).
One of the significant challenges to educationists and policy makers is to see ‘what
works’. Unfortunately it is a commonly heard complaint that many educational poli-
cies are introduced by political will rather than on the basis of evidence of whether they
will actually bring about improvements. The move to evidence-based education has to
be clear what constitutes evidence and what that evidence is actually telling us
(Eisenhart 2005). In the world of medicine, a new drug might take ten years to
develop, to undergo clinical trials, to meet the standards required by the appropriate
4 The world of cause and effect
authorities, and even then only between 1:2,000 and 1:10,000 drugs that have been
tested are actually approved for human use. Now look at the world of education: poli-
cies and initiatives are introduced on the most slender of evidence, and a signal feature
of many educational initiatives and interventions is their lack of a rigorous evidence
base. There is an urgent need to understand causation in order to understand what
works, for whom and under what conditions; what interventions are required; and what
processes occur and with what effects. Understanding causation is vital here.
There have been several recent moves to ensure that educational policy making is
informed by evidence rather than political will. For example, the Social,
Psychological, Educational and Criminological Controlled Trials Register (SPECTR)
has been established, with over 10,000 references (Milwain 1998; Milwain et al. 1999;
Davies 1999; Evans et al. 2000), evidence is appearing in the literature (e.g. Davies
1999; Oakley 2000, Davies et al. 2000; Evans et al. 2000; Levačić and Glatter 2000),
and an Evidence-Based Education Network has been established in the UK
(http://www.cem.dur.ac.uk). The University of London’s Institute of Education has
established its ‘EPPI-centre’: the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and
Co-ordinating Centre (http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/EPPIWeb/home.aspx), and it has already
published very many research syntheses (e.g. Harlen 2004a; 2004b). The Campbell
Collaboration (http://campbellcollaboration.org) and the What Works Clearinghouse
(http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/) produce an evidence base for decision making. There is
a groundswell of opinion to suggest the need for evidence to inform policy making
(Davis 1995; Cohen et al. 2000: 394; Levačić and Glatter 2000; Ayres 2008).
We should know whether something works, and why, before we put it into policy and
practice.
There is a need to bring together the worlds of research, practice and theory.
Goldthorpe (2007a: 8) berates social scientists for their inability to have developed laws
and to have linked research with the development of cumulative theory, as has been
done in the hard sciences. This book seeks to address this matter in part. It introduces
and opens up an understanding of causation. It deliberately avoids the formulaic pre-
sentations that one reads in philosophical works and works on logic. That is not to
demean these; on the contrary, they are essential in clarifying and applying concepts of
causation. However, it places these into words, so that the novice reader can grasp their
significance for the approach adopted here.
Causation – cause and effect – is no simple matter. If only it were, but it is not! This
book indicates why causation is far from being as straightforward as policy makers
might have us believe. It is complex, convoluted, multi-faceted and often opaque.
What starts out as being a simple exercise – finding the effects of causes and finding
the causes of effects – is often the optimism of ignorance. One can soon become stuck
in a quagmire of uncertainty, multiplicity of considerations, and unsureness of the rela-
tions between causes and effects. The intention of this book is to indicate what some of
these issues might be and how educational researchers, theorists and practitioners can
address them. The book seeks to be practical, as much educational research is a practical
matter. In this enterprise one important point is to understand the nature of causation;
another is to examine difficulties in reaching certainty about causation; another is to
ensure that all the relevant causal factors are introduced into an explanation of causation;
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