Almost all social science theory is based on sets and their relations. Correlation-based methods of scientific enquiry, however, are unsuited to analyzing set relations because causation is assumed to be symmetric. The development of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) by Charles Ragin has given social scientists a formal tool for identifying asymmetric set-theoretic connections. As a result, interest in this method has markedly risen among social scientists in recent years.
This book offers the first complete introduction on how to conduct QCA in the R software environment for statistical computing and graphics using the QCA package. Built as a comprehensive solution, QCA provides full functionality for analyzing crisp, multi-value and fuzzy sets, including the graphical visualization of results. The reader is not required to have knowledge of R, but the book assumes an understanding of the fundamentals of QCA. Using examples from published work, the authors demonstrate how to make the most of QCA for the reader’s own purposes. It is written mainly for political scientists and sociologists, but may also be of interest to scholars from other disciplines of the social sciences.
