Associational versus correlational research study design and data analysis

There are many PC, some are intrapersonal (e.g., meditation, exercising, thinking…), some cooperatively interpersonal (e.g., psychotherapy, parenting, cohabiting…), some competitively interpersonal (e.g., debating, marketing, fighting…). It is through the practice of these that SHP can influence humanity’s long run distribution of experienced quality of life. This distribution is optimal when it is maximally high, narrow, and upward skewed over the long run. This obviously does ignore the issue of how its achievement would affect the welfare of Earth’s other forms of life. Insofar as the dimensions of these PC overlap their study should be organized to take advantage of this, but how exceeds the ambition of this paper.

Sufficient condition causality (as analyzed in Krause and Howard 2002; Krause 2010) may require some explication here. A sufficient condition cause of an effect is reliably followed by this effect, but how long after it is followed must be discovered. An effect’s having one sort of sufficient condition cause does not preclude its having others as well, but having a necessary and sufficient condition cause does preclude this. Having control of a necessary and sufficient condition cause of an effect entails complete control over both the presence and the absence of this effect, whereas control of a simply sufficient condition cause entails some control over the effect’s presence but none necessarily over its absence because there may be other such causes. Sufficient condition causes of a given effect may be quite complex and consist of a large conjunction of necessary elements, some necessary only in certain combinations with particular others, some necessary in all. Until all the necessary condition components of a sufficient condition cause are known, none can confidently be said to be known. A conditionally necessary causal influence on a given effect requires the company of certain other necessary antecedents to conjointly constitute a compound sufficient condition cause of that effect. An unconditionally necessary causal influence on a given effect is something always required in order to constitute a sufficient condition cause of that effect. It shall be assumed here that there are no events without a cause, which I take to be the usual assumption of all empirical science. It is prudent to assume that all events have effects and to appreciate that there is no incompatibility between sufficient condition causality and qualitative research.