Causal Mechanisms in Social Science: Understanding and Applying the Methodology of Process Tracing

Recent developments in philosophy of science have lead scholars from unification to causal mechanisms. Process tracing, as a systematically qualitative methodology, is used for both theory testing and theory building. The goal of this paper is to explore mechanism’s philosophy and to explain the process tracing method so that new case studies are conducted, leaving from correlational analysis to causal mechanisms. Accordingly, this essay describes process tracing using step-by-step approach and then some misunderstanding about it is presented.