 Dear students, in this module, we are going to talk about understanding causality. What does it mean when we say that something has caused something? So recognizing the complexity of causal relationships in social phenomena. It's not very simple, it's not that the one thing is directly causing the other thing and we can just by our observations, we can decipher or we can explore that this relationship can be understood by having one phenomenon as a variable which is affecting the other variable. What is the relationship between the two events? And can we typically only establish this on the basis of Mahaz observation? That yes, this thing that has happened, this is the only reason why this has happened. So avoiding simplistic and reductionistic explanations of social phenomena. When we talk about sociology, we talk about social scientists. So in fact, our training in that field requires us not to see things in a simplistic way which is based on our typical face value, which is the opinion that has been established. We should not consider it as a final result. The cause of social phenomena that we have to discover is rather much more complex and much more difficult. I will give you a small example. If there are two people sitting in one room and suddenly one person's mobile is stolen and disappears from there, then maybe you will feel that if there were two people sitting then the doubt can go above that one person. Which is very obvious, however. If there are eight or ten people sitting there and one person's mobile is stolen then we should try to estimate this on the basis of our common sense knowledge that the person who is sitting close to that person or who has animosity with him, is an enemy, is a personality, or whose typical history, his parental history, we should immediately try to develop a cause on the basis of that. This mobile must have been stolen by this person. It may be that this thing is not a cause, it is a correlation. The relationship between cause and correlation or the difference is very important to understand. Like typically you must have seen in movies and dramas that sometimes one is killed in a scene and it proves to be a criminal by any individual on the basis of mutual agreement. So this agreement may be a correlation. Similarly, in social relationships, in human behavior, when we look at things and on the basis of common sense, many correlations seem to be causation to us. Whereas when we try to systematically understand them, maybe they do not come in front of us as a cause, rather as a correlation. The difference is that these two variables or these two events occur at the same time. That person was standing there as an agreement or suddenly entered that room and then someone was killed or killed in front of him. Similarly, in social phenomena, we cannot call correlation as a causation. Considering alternative explanations and potential confounding factors to establish the causal relationships. In the context of social phenomena, because multiple factors can be involved, like we are talking about why the price is increasing, why the price is increasing. So it may be that the price is a correlation between them and a direct relationship. But who is causing it? Is the price or the price is increasing because of the price? In order to establish this, we need a systematic observation. Being mindful of the ethical implications of causal research and interventions. When we talk about ethics, especially in human relationships, there is a big role of ethics. We consider this society as a lab for ourselves. We cannot do this without trying to trigger the same environment within ourselves. In fact, there are two groups, one of them was a violent clash on some occasion. Since we are sociologists and we were not present on that occasion, we should try to trigger this event again, so we cannot do this ethically. So sociologists are bound by the professional code of ethics because of which we cannot re-occur such events because of which there is a loss in the society. Using causal knowledge to inform the policy and practice, when once a cause is established after rigorous process of scientific research, then we make it a part of our policy and practice. Food for thought for you again at the end of this module, that it's an example from Pakistani society that investigating the causes of child labour and developing effective interventions to address the issue. If you look at child labour, typically we see that child labour is a part of the cause. But when you dig deeper and try to explore, what are the possible explanations? What other causes can be there? It can be that parents being uneducated becomes a factor. It can be that living on a specific place becomes a factor. Geographic locality or location becomes a factor. So all these things can help you understand it better. There are a lot of things that you are considering as causation today. Later on, I will prove that as correlation.