Beyond Interaction Effects: Two Logics for Studying Population Inequalities
arXiv:2601.04223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When sociologists and other social scientist ask whether the return to college differs by race and gender, they face a choice between two fundamentally different modes of inquiry. Traditional interaction models follow deductive logic: the researcher specifies which variables moderate effects and tests these hypotheses. Machine learning methods follow inductive logic: algorithms search across vast combinatorial spaces to discover patterns of heterogeneity. This article develops a framework for navigating between these approaches. We […]