Methodological Foundations of Modern Causal Inference in Social Science Research

Abstract

This paper serves as a literature review of methodology concerning the (modern) causal inference methods to address the causal estimand with observational/survey data that have been or will be used in social science research. Mainly, this paper is divided into two parts: inference from statistical estimand for the causal estimand, in which we reviewed the assumptions for causal identification and the methodological strategies addressing the problems if some of the assumptions are violated. We also discuss the asymptotical analysis concerning the measure from the observational data to the theoretical measure and replicate the deduction of the efficient/doubly robust average treatment effect estimator, which is commonly used in current social science analysis.