Question

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

Answer 1

The criteria for nomothetic causality are:

1) Variables must be correlated: For instance, hobbies of elder sublings are found to be correlated with hobbies of younger siblings.

2) Cause takes place before the effect: For instance, the hobby of the elder sibling would determine the hobby of the younger sibling. Therefore, the hobby of the elder sibling is likely to be the cause in this relationship.

3) Effect cannot be explained in terms of a third variable: That is, it needs to be a nonspurious effect.

The obstacles in the search for nomothetic causality:

1) The ecological fallacy: This refers to the danger of making assertions about individuals when the unit of analysis is a group. This means the researcher might get diverted from the research topic and the analysis would therefore get irrelevant.

2) Reductionism: This is being overly restrictive as to what kind of concepts and variables could be used for explanation. For example, in explaining a social disorder in an individual a researcher only considers individual factors but not social factors.