QCA: A Package for Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Abstract

We present QCA, a package for performing Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). QCA is becoming increasingly popular with social scientists, but none of the existing software alternatives covers the full range of core procedures. This gap is now filled by QCA. After a mapping of the method's diffusion, we introduce some of the package's main capabilities, including the calibration of crisp and fuzzy sets, the analysis of necessity relations, the construction of truth tables and the derivation of complex, parsimonious and intermediate solutions.T. P. Wickham-Crowley. A qualitative comparative approach to Latin American revolutions.

A prospective registry evaluating the epidemiology and clinical care of traumatic brain injury patients presenting to a regional referral hospital in Moshi, Tanzania: challenges and the way forward

“…The three basic Boolean operators are logical OR (C), logical AND ( Ã ), and logical NOT (where the negative is customarily denoted in QCA by replacing an uppercase letter with a lowercase letter). The QCA model was constituted following guidelines and cares provided in the literature represented with a network display (Kolaczyk & Cs ardi, 2014;Rihoux, 2006;Thiem & Duşa, 2013). Logistic models and QCA were conducted with R Language for Statistical Computing (R software) v. 3.1.2 (The R Project for Statistical Computing, 2015).…”

When More is Not Better: Complementarities, Costs and Contingencies in Stakeholder Management

“…For this reason we rely on set-theoretic methods (Ragin, 2008). Set-theoretic methods (STM) are increasingly used in strategic management, partly because of recent methodological improvements such as the possibility of using fuzzy sets and the newer possibilities to apply statistical tests using STATA (Longest and Vaisey, 2008) or R (Thiem and Dusa, 2013), something that we do in this paper. STM pros and cons and the differences with other econometric techniques have been extensively discussed before (Fiss, 2007(Fiss, , 2011Ragin, 2008) and, thus, we only discuss the main issues here.…”

Navigating the Complexities of Qualitative Comparative Analysis

“…The results of a reanalysis of all applied articles listed in Table 1 for which data were available suggest that of 26 analyses that could have been performed for each possible outcome, 17 showed ambiguities in the range of 2 to 66 models. 23 The only two computer programs that are currently capable of bringing this information to the attention of the researcher are the QCA package (Duşa & Thiem, 2014;Thiem & Duşa, 2013b, 2013c and the CNA package (Ambuehl, Baumgartner, Kauffmann, & Thiem, 2014;Baumgartner, 2009Baumgartner, , 2013, both for the R environment (R Development Core Team, 2014). To summarize, restrictions to minimal sum models are inappropriate for purposes of causal data analysis.…”