1 EIGHT MYTHS ABOUT CAUSALITY AND STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELS

Social scientists ’ interest in causal effects is as old as the social sciences. Attention to the philosophical underpinnings and the methodological challenges of analyzing causality has waxed and waned. Other authors in this volume trace the history of the concept of causality in the social sciences and we leave this task to their skilled hands. But we do note that we are at a time when there is a renaissance, if not a revolution in the methodology of causal inference, and structural equation models play a major role in this renaissance. Our emphasis in this chapter is on causality and structural equation models (SEMs). If nothing else, the pervasiveness of SEMs justifies such a focus. SEM applications are published in numerous substantive journals. Methodological developments on SEMs regularly appear in journals such as Sociological Methods & Research, Psychometrika, Sociological Methodology, Multivariate Behavioral Research, Psychological Methods, and Structural Equation Modeling, not to mention the econometrics literature. Over 3,000 subscribers belong to SEMNET, a listserv devoted to SEMs. Thus interest in SEMs is high and continues to grow