What kind of phenomena are we talking about? You should specify if you're referring more narrowly to social and historical phenomena, because that's where the biggest gaps between what one can say on the surface about them and what actually drove them are. It's also a very murky area in regards to specifying causality.

The only reasonably effective method I've tried for this is to first read the Wikipedia article, to get an overview of the objective facts, events, numbers and so on, then try to find press articles about the topic, which are less objective but include more details.