💐Causal Mapping: a Garden of Ideas#
🌸 Starting to use the Causal Map app and want to know more about the theory and practice of causal mapping? What is it, what is it good for, how can you do it?
🌻 You've skimmed through a couple of our publications but want to see how it all fits together?
🪻 Here you'll find dozens of one-pagers setting out the key ideas in causal mapping as we see it, curated and assembled from existing publications and blog posts.
The titles of most of these "ideas" pages are expressed in the form of a single thought or claim or idea, like "Causal coding is easy to automate".
This Garden will also serve as a background companion to the Causal Map app. The app has its help which is also integrated into the app itself. Those help pages are also available as the last chapter of this Garden. That chapter is all about how to use the app whereas the rest of this Garden is a more discursive look at the theory and everything that surrounds causal mapping.
We have also included some of our most popular LinkedIn posts, especially on AI.
⚒️ This site is very much a work in progress! A lot more ideas are still to come!
During 20 years of conducting evaluations, the lead author became persuaded of the central importance of collecting and being able to aggregate causal propositions embedded in written and spoken data. Further interest in causal mapping arose from discussions with the other authors who had developed a qualitative impact evaluation protocol (the QuIP), which relies on causal mapping for analysis of narrative data. This prompted further expansion of the search for literature and software that could assist in systematically constructing causal maps as a way of presenting the outcome of such impact-evaluation studies. A main product of this action research has been the design of new software and detailed guidelines for causal mapping, which have already been used in many evaluations around the world.
At Causal Map we are relatively agnostic about data collection. We are most interested in causal evidence and beliefs derived from different sources.
In this chapter we present some of key general principles about how to do causal mapping which we at Causal Map Ltd (and, most of the time, at BathSDR) have adopted.
In the previous chapter [[0.001 Task 2 -- Introduction]] we looked at the main ideas of minimalist coding:
The fundamental output of causal mapping is a database of causal links. If there are not too many links, this database can be visualised "as-is" in the form of a causal map or network. But usually there are too many links for this to be very useful, so we apply filters.
Thanks guys, there's lots to like here and lots to agree with. Helping to find what causal hypotheses to focus on... What do you have to say about pathways as opposed to individual links/mechanisms? If we called this approach "quality and rigour in causal mechanisms evaluation" would that miss anything?
Disclaimer: for me, the logic around how links might combine into pathways and what that means for evaluation, that's the most exciting part. e.g. how might this intervention influence an outcome which might be multiple steps downstream of it?
opinionated AI coding
Most people will probably skip this page, but if you are interested in learning about the basic ideas of causal mapping without using our app at all, but just using a spreadsheet program, read on!
This exciting new possibility to do auto coding at Causal Map is invitation only at the moment.
using just West region overall 488:1135 neg to positive. ![[Pasted image 20251008154723.png]] applying a set of magnets mostly auto created at 60% sim ![[Pasted image 20251008154653.png]] however when reducing to the top 26 links by source, 71:312. ![[Pasted image 20251008154808.png]] so the negative links are
Based on [[Just add rigour Three do’s and don’ts]]
There are many different ways to collect data for causal mapping: [[000 Task 1 -- Introduction]].
11/12/2025
Here are some thoughts from a couple of years ago when genAI first hit us, plus some thoughts about where we are going with it.
This is just an internal note to remind us what styles are available in the Garden.