The purpose of this post is to provide some guidelines to aid in inferring causation in social science research. At the moment, the post just defines confounding variables, distinguishes them from other third-variables (e.g. mediators and colliders), and provides some examples of statistical techniques that can be used to control for confounding variables. In the future, I hope to cover in more detail regression analysis, causal diagrams, multicollinearity, and other concepts important to understand to infer causation in the social sciences.