Qualitative Comparative Analysis with R

Social science theory often builds on sets and their relations. Correlation-based methods of scientific inquiry, 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 risen markedly 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.