Presentation of the cross-disciplinary project

The AIAS 3-2-1-Go! Collaborative Theme Group “Designing Endogeneity” brings together researchers from management, political science, public health, clinical epidemiology, and 
philosophy of science around a shared tension in social and health sciences. The credibility revolution since the 1980s pushed researchers toward designs that remove or isolate endogeneity to strengthen causal inference. But our group’s premise is that in many settings, the discretionary decisions filtered out by identification strategies are precisely what bring social outcomes worth studying into being. Across disciplines, researchers have begun arriving independently at this same realization. Our group turns this emerging convergence into a shared intellectual agenda by developing common vocabulary and research designs that keep these decisions analytically visible. Its aim is to close the growing gap between what current methods can identify and what social scientists most need to explain.