Dataset Information

Qualitative Comparative Analysis and robust sufficiency.

ABSTRACT: Some methodologists take the search target of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to be causal INUS-conditions, others contend that QCA should instead be used to search for some form of sufficiency that is more substantive than mere Boolean sufficiency. While the notion of an INUS-condition has a long and uncontroversial definitional history, Adrian Dusa, in a recent paper, is the first to explicitly define a notion of substantive sufficiency, which he labels robust sufficiency. Dusa's definition, however, is vacuous in real-life research contexts. As an alternative, the first part of this paper non-vacuously defines robust sufficiency and supplies a corresponding notion of minimality, which-I argue-captures Dusa's conceptual intentions. In the second part, I then report and discuss the results of a series of simulation experiments benchmarking the performance of the different QCA solution types in recovering robust sufficiency and minimality.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11135-021-01157-z.

SUBMITTER: Baumgartner M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8219789 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Qualitative Comparative Analysis and robust sufficiency.

Baumgartner Michael M

Quality & quantity 20210623 4

Some methodologists take the search target of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to be causal INUS-conditions, others contend that QCA should instead be used to search for some form of sufficiency that is more substantive than mere Boolean sufficiency. While the notion of an INUS-condition has a long and uncontroversial definitional history, Adrian Dusa, in a recent paper, is the first to explicitly define a notion of substantive sufficiency, which he labels <i>robust sufficiency</i>. Dusa's ...[more]

PMID: 34176971

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Qualitative Comparative Analysis and robust sufficiency.

Supplementary information

Publications

Qualitative Comparative Analysis and robust sufficiency.

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