Research on verbal probabilities has shown that "unlikely" or "improbable" events are believed to correspond to numerical probability values between 10% and 30%. However, building on a pragmatic approach of verbal probabilities and a new methodology, the present paper shows that unlikely outcomes are most often associated with outcomes that have a…

Most questions in social and biomedical sciences are causal in nature: what would happen to individuals, or to groups, if part of their environment were changed? In this groundbreaking text, two world-renowned experts present statistical methods for studying such questions. This book starts with the notion of potential outcomes, each corresponding…

Mediation is usually assessed by a regression-based or structural equation modeling (SEM) approach that we refer to as the classical approach. This approach relies on the assumption that there are no confounders that influence both the mediator, "M", and the outcome, "Y". This assumption holds if individuals are randomly…