How to compare apples with apples - or: Why causal inference is important for everyone

6 March 2025

Whether during the coronavirus pandemic, in marketing or in classic online evaluations - statistical analyses play a major role in our everyday lives, as they have a direct or indirect influence on private, economic or even political decisions. This makes it all the more important to familiarise ourselves with the methods of causal inference in order to understand cause-and-effect relationships at their core.

How to compare apples with apples - or: Why causal inference is important for everyone

Shownotes

Together with Prof Dr Martin Spindler, Dr Philipp Bach has therefore fundamentally revised a Bachelor's lecture and exercise on causality at the University of Hamburg Business School and added fresh examples and practical tasks. After a successful pilot phase, which was initially only open to students of business administration, he has now opened the lecture to students of all other subjects at UHH. The motto: "Causal inference for everyone!"

The aim: to build up a basic understanding of causal inference by allowing students from all subjects to test the knowledge they have learnt with their own statistical analyses and by creating their own ‘data products’ that are as clear as possible.

The interdisciplinary teaching project "Causal Inference for All!" is now in its third round of funding from the Digital and Data Literacy in Teaching Lab (DDLitLab for short) and has evolved from a subject-specific to an interdisciplinary course. In the coming semester, the course will be expanded to include AI and machine learning and will remain open to all UHH students.

Shownotes:

Funding period: 01.04.2023 - 31.03.2024

Funding website of the 2nd funding round: Opening the "Digital Causality Lab" - Causal Inference for All!

Open course website: https://digitalcausalitylab.github.io/

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This and other interviews on funded teaching projects at the DDLitLab can be found here.

Conception & production: Julia Pawlowski, Sven Rehder, Simon Steinhauser
Digital and Data Literacy in Teaching Lab, February 2024/25

Spotlight: Data Literacy Teaching Lab

In our series "Spotlight: Data Literacy Teaching Lab", we talk to lecturers who have received funding for their teaching projects from the Digital and Data Literacy in Teaching Lab (DDLitLab for short) at the University of Hamburg.

What were the innovative ideas of the projects? What were the particular didactic and content-related challenges, and the highlights?
And are there perhaps specific tips for other teachers who would also like to set up a new teaching project and are looking for experience reports?

We will clarify this and more in our look at and behind the scenes. Spotlight on!