The social science literature is full of discussions about causation and what the best method for causal inference might be. However, a relatively small percentage of them draw on the philosophical debate about causation. Certainly, there is a great deal of talk about philosophy of science on the ontological and metaphysical level, including, for example, engagement with the relation between neo-positivism and realism.

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a method utilized by different disciplines in the social sciences and beyond, e.g., business economics and management. However, QCA users must still justify their choice of method more frequently than the users of other methods. Whatever the reason, it is actually not a bad thing to reflect upon the choice of a method because it should be suitable for answering our research question.

If this was a blog post about the #APSA2014, I would have to write about Friday night’s fire emergency at the Marriott (i.e., #APSAonfire) as the non-academic event that left a definite imprint (and affected me as one of the many people who had a room at the Marriott). But uncomfortable as that night had been, I will focus instead on the ongoing debate about set theory and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) which are the

More often than one might expect, television series and films offer excellent illustrations of methodological and methods-related arguments (which is worth a blog post of its own). When I was working on my paper on comparative hypothesis testing in process tracing, I was watching the first season of the terrific TV series, Homeland.

The methods literature on process tracing took a Bayesian turn in recent years. Bayesian inference, whereby you condition on evidence in order to update your prior confidence in a hypothesis, is presented as a mode of inference one should follow in process tracing (Bennett, Andrew (2008): Process-Tracing: A Bayesian Perspective. Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M., Henry Brady and David Collier (ed.):

Qualitative Methods (i.e., process tracing, set theoretic methods, informal Bayesian inference etc.) and multi-method research, in particular the combination of regression analysis or QCA with case studies, are certainly a growth industry in political science and sociology. In light of some methods panels held at the APSA Annual Meeting in Chicago and the ECPR General Conference in Bordeaux, this might actually come as a surprise.

Under the rubric of “Reader’s view”, I will post short reviews of books, mostly from the field of social science methods.

In the case study literature, one new pair of terms has been established by the field that concerns the distinction between data set observations and causal process observations . In short, Collier, Brady, and Seawright (2004: Sources of Leverage in Causal Inference: Toward an Alternative View of Methodology. Brady, Henry E. and David Collier (eds.): Rethinking Social Inquiry.