Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application is a comprehensive guide to QCA. As QCA becomes increasingly popular across the social sciences, this textbook teaches students, scholars, and self-learners the fundamentals of the method, research design, interpretation of results, and how to present findings.
"This book offers a hands-on introduction and teaching resource for students, users, and teachers of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA; Ragin, 1987, 2000, 2008b). Given its superior ability to model certain aspects of complexity, QCA has made inroads into virtually every social science discipline and beyond. Software solutions for QCA have also been developing at a fast pace. This book seeks to reduce the time and effort required when we first encounter the logic of not just a new method but also new software. It offers a genuinely simple, intuitive, and hands-on resource for implementing the state-of-the-art protocol of QCA using R, the most advanced software environment for QCA. Our book has an applied and practical focus"--
"Theories of Comparative Analysis" provides a detailed examination of comparative analysis, the problem of predicting how a system will react to perturbations in its parameters, and why. It clearly formalizes the problem and presents two novel techniques - differential qualitative (DQ) analysis and exaggeration - that solve many comparative analysis problems, providing explanations suitable for use by design systems, automated diagnosis, intelligent tutoring systems, and explanation-based generalization.Weld first places comparative analysis within the context of qualitative physics and artificial intelligence. He then explains the theoretical basis for each technique and describes how they are implemented. He shows that they are essentially complementary: DQ analysis is sound, while exaggeration is a heuristic method: exaggeration, however, solves a wider variety of problems. Weld summarizes their similarities and differences and introduces a hybrid architecture that takes advantage of the strengths of each technique.Daniel S. Weld is Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. "Theories of Comparative Analysis" is included in the Artificial Intelligence Series, edited by Michael Brady, Daniel Bobrow, and Randall Davis.
A conceptual and analytical framework for understanding economic institutions and institutional change. Markets are one of the most salient institutions produced by humans, and economists have traditionally analyzed the workings of the market mechanism. Recently, however, economists and others have begun to appreciate the many institution-related events and phenomena that have a significant impact on economic performance. Examples include the demise of the communist states, the emergence of Silicon Valley and e-commerce, the European currency unification, and the East Asian financial crises. In this book Masahiko Aoki uses modern game theory to develop a conceptual and analytical framework for understanding issues related to economic institutions. The wide-ranging discussion considers how institutions evolve, why their overall arrangements are robust and diverse across economies, and why they do or do not change in response to environmental factors such as technological progress, global market integration, and demographic change.
This new addition to the Applied Social Research Methods series is unrivalled, it is written by leaders in the growing field of rigorous, comparative techniques.
A revolutionary textbook introducing masters and doctoral students to the major research approaches and methodologies in the social sciences. Written by an outstanding set of scholars, and derived from successful course teaching, this volume will empower students to choose their own approach to research, to justify this approach, and to situate it within the discipline. It addresses questions of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of social science, and proceeds to issues of methodology and research design essential for producing a good research proposal. It also introduces researchers to the main issues of debate and contention in the methodology of social sciences, identifying commonalities, historic continuities and genuine differences.
Volume One of the Classics of Comparative Policy Analysis, "Theory and Methods in Comparative Policy Analysis Studies" includes chapters that apply or further theory and methodology in the comparative study of public policy, in general, and policy analysis, in particular. Throughout the volume the chapters engage in theory building by assessing the relevance of theoretical approaches drawn from the social sciences, as well as some which are distinctive to policy analysis. Other chapters focus on various comparative approaches based on developments and challenges in the methodology of policy analysis. Together, this collection provides a comprehensive scholastic foundation to comparative policy analysis and comparative policy studies. "Theory and Methods in Comparative Policy Analysis Studies" will be of great interest to scholars and learners of public policy and social sciences, as well as to practitioners considering what can be learned or facilitated through methodologically and theoretically sound approaches. The chapters were originally published as articles in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis which in the last two decades has pioneered the development of comparative public policy. The volume is part of a four-volume series, the Classics of Comparative Policy Analysis including Theories and Methods, Institutions and Governance, Regional Comparisons, and Policy Sectors. Each volume showcases a different new chapter comparing domains of study interrelated with comparative public policy: political science, public administration, governance and policy design, authored by the JCPA co-editors Giliberto Capano, Iris Geva-May, Michael Howlett, Leslie A. Pal and B. Guy Peters.
Social science theory often builds on sets and their relations. Correlation-based methods of scientific enquiry, however, use linear algebra and are unsuited to analyzing set relations. The development of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) by Charles Ragin has given social scientists a formal tool for identifying set-theoretic connections based on Boolean algebra. 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 perform QCA in the R software environment for statistical computing and graphics with the QCA package. Developed as a comprehensive solution, QCA provides an unprecedented scope of functionality for analyzing crisp, multi-value and fuzzy sets. 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’s wide-ranging capabilities for the reader’s own purposes. Although mainly written for political scientists, this book is also of interest to scholars from other disciplines in the social sciences such as sociology, business, management, organization, anthropology, education and health.
Decentering Comparative Analysis in a Globalizing World aims to renew the comparative method by questioning the inherited comparative categories. By varying the analytical perspectives in different empirical and social sciences fields, this volume opens new spaces for the comparative method.
