Cause & Consequence

Cause & Consequence are fairly easy concepts to understand.  Essentially you are looking for clues to try and determine what happened in the past and why.  Cause and consequence look specifically at what influenced the events to occur and then what the spin offs of that event are.  How & Why certain conditions and actions led to others!

The cause can be many things:  conditions, ideologies, institutions, beliefs, circumstances, actions, prior events.

Just as in everyday life (and history) things that happen can have immediate, underlying and/or long-term consequences and these can vary in importance.  In order to determine the importance of the events one has to provide evidence to support your claims (think Napoleon report card!).  

www.TC2.ca recommends using the following criteria to help you:

0. Determining the importance of causes
   
• Evidence of a causal connection. Is the cause clearly connected with the event and not just a coincidence? If this factor were removed, how likely is it that the event would still have occurred?
  
• Degree of influence. To what extent did the cause contribute to the direction and intensity of the event or make other causes more or less important?
  
• Absence of alternative explanations. Is there no reason to suspect that some other factor, closely aligned with the suggested causal factor, can explain the outcome?
  
  
  Determining the importance of consequences
  

  • Depth of impact: How deeply felt or profound was the consequence?
    
  • Breadth of impact: How widespread were its impacts?
    
  • Duration of impact: How long-lasting was the consequence?