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.

For what it’s worth, I wanted to see how often ‘process tracing’ is mentioned in the offerings on Google Books.

For some time now, a discussion has been raging about the pros and cons of set theory and the use of set-theoretic methods (STM) in the social sciences (e.g., in Sociological Methodology and the APSA Newsletter). Following up on a critical discussion by Paine and a constructive, comparative discussion of STM and regression analysis by Thiem, Baumgartner and Bol (TBB), Comparative Political Studies organized a symposium on STM.

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.

People familiar with the development of qualitative methods know that process tracing has developed rapidly over the last years. As the discussion about a method becomes broader and deeper, it becomes more important to systematize and sort the field in order to understand what it can and cannot achieve.