This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Baumgartner, M. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Inferring Causal Complexity

University of Bern, Switzerland, baumgartner{at}philo.unibe.ch

In The Comparative Method, Ragin (1987) outlined a procedure of Boolean causal reasoning operating on pure coincidence data that has since become widely known as qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) among social scientists. QCA—including its recent forms as presented in Ragin (2000, 2008)—is designed to analyze causal structures featuring no more than one effect and a possibly complex configuration of mutually independent direct causes of that effect. This article presents a procedure of causal reasoning that operates on the same type of empirical data as QCA and that implements Boolean techniques related to the ones resorted to by QCA. Yet in contrast to QCA, the procedure introduced here successfully identifies structures involving both multiple effects and mutually dependent causes. In this sense, this article generalizes QCA.

Key Words: causal discovery • data analysis • causal complexity • Boolean causal reasoning • qualitative comparative analysis (QCA)

Sociological Methods & Research, Vol. 38, No. 1, 71-101 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0049124109339369


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?