Inspired by an email exchange I had with someone on theoretically non-exclusive hypotheses in Bayesian process tracing, I believed it might be useful to write down some thoughts in a blog post. It ended up as a PDF on Github because it has a minor R element and formal notation.
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.
For what it’s worth, I wanted to see how often ‘process tracing’ is mentioned in the offerings on Google Books.
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.
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.