Bringing External Validity into Sociological Research

Abstract The so-called causal revolution that has spread through economics and into adjacent social sciences, including sociology, has been very much concerned with developing methods by which to arrive at credible causal estimates, especially in nonexperimental, observational settings. In the language of experiments, it has focussed on internal validity. But much less attention has been paid to external validity, that is, whether a causal relationship holds in situations other than the one in which it was found. Thinking about external validity obliges us to consider why we are trying to estimate causal relationships in the first place, and what we think they are for. In this paper we discuss in greater…