Causal mapping is my main line of work. You take what people say about what causes what, code those statements as causal links, and assemble them into a map you can search and quote back to source.
I co-founded Causal Map Ltd in 2019 to build software for this, and I now spend most of my time on it.
The method
- Causal mapping for evaluators, with James Copestake and Fiona Remnant, in Evaluation (2024). The paper that sets out the approach, and there is a short summary if you want the argument without the journal.
- Minimalist coding for causal mapping, why we code a link as nothing more than one cause, one effect and a quote.
- Causal mapping in evaluation, including how it complements contribution analysis and outcome harvesting, and what poor data quality does to it.
- Causal mapping as qualitative data analysis, for readers coming from QDA rather than from evaluation.
Book chapters
- Theories of change and causal maps in Ghana, with James Copestake and Fiona Remnant: what happens when you set a programme’s official theory of change against a map coded from what people said.
- Qualitative causal mapping in evaluations, on health services, with Fiona Remnant, James Copestake and Melanie Channon.
All of this and more is in the Causal Map Garden, where we write up the method as we go: the article summaries, the working papers and the bibliography.
The software
- Causal Map, the app for building causal maps from interview transcripts and documents.
- The Guide to Causal Map, the current documentation.
I also write a weekly LinkedIn newsletter, Causal mapping, evaluation, AI, and a second one, Causal Map Highlights, for stories built from narrative data with the app.
Older pieces about causal mapping, kept because people still link to them: