An experimental study has found that alcoholics who attend peer group meetings are more successful in reducing their consumption of alcoholic beverages than alcoholics who do not attend such meetings. in the conclusions to their report on this experiment, the researchers suggest that it will be important for future studies to determine whether the support group effect was due to the social support itself, the sharing of technical information, or the time taken up by the meetings. this suggestion reflects a concern with:

This suggestion reflects a concern with causal mechanisms. The Causal mechanism is the procedures or passageways over which an outcome is taken into being. There are two broad types of theories of causation which is the Humean theory which is causation as regularities and the causal-realist theory which is causation as a causal mechanism. The Humean theory embraces that causation is completely established by facts about empirical regularities among noticeable variables in which there is no fundamental causal nature, causal power or causal necessity while the causal-realist takes concepts of causal mechanisms and causal powers as essential, and holds that the undertaking of scientific research is to attain at empirically defensible theories and hypotheses about those causal mechanisms.