About two weeks ago, COMPASSS issued a Statement on Rejecting Article Submissions because of QCA Solution Type. In short, the reasoning was that methodological work on QCA is developing and that reviewers and editors should not judge empirical work based on whether one particular solution type is interpreted as causal.
How to properly interpret consistency and coverage values in fuzzy-set QCA.
Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is the method of choice for the analysis of set relations and has changed considerably and improved over the years.
One of the recent big and, in my view, underappreciated innovations in the field of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is Baumgartner’s formulation of the Coincidence Analysis algorithm (CNA). Baumgartner presents it as an alternative to QCA, which I do not find convincing because I do not see QCA married to a specific algorithm.
Among the recent criticisms of QCA, Lucas and Szatrowski’s (LS) critique stands out in multiple respects, including its scope, its tone (QCA is “a nonanalytic means to identify asymmetric causal illusions”, p. 66), and the responses it provoked (and the notorious mistake in their first simulation). Naturally, the critical replies focused on LS’s assessment of QCA, but I find that they make an almost equally interesting and ironic claim at the
How to enhance reproducibility when using fs/QCA software
As is well known, QCA has been under intense scrutiny in recent years and subject to criticism (sometimes quite strong). I am not going to review studies on the validity of QCA that entail criticism;
When we use the Quine-McCluskey algorithm to derive a QCA solution, we can choose between the conservative, intermediate or parsimonious solution. While I do not have any figures about which solution has been produced how frequently in empirical research, it is safe to say that the conservative solution is quite popular.
At the end of last week, a two-day conference, Qualitative Comparative Analysis – Social Science Applications and Methodological Challenges , took place in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Needless to say, the recent and ongoing wave of criticism of QCA was a key topic on the agenda and in discussions among participants.
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.