New article „Beyond the Facts: Limited Empirical Diversity and Causal Inference in Qualitative Comparative Analysis“ published in Sociological Methods & Research:
Recent research has found the conservative (QCA-CS) and the intermediate solution type (QCA-IS) of QCA to fail fundamental tests of correctness. This problem does not affect the parsimonious solution type (QCA-PS). These findings conflict with conventional wisdom, which has it that QCA-IS is preferable to both QCA-CS and QCA-PS. This article resolves these contradictions. It shows that QCA-CS and QCA-IS systematically supplement empirical data with artificial data, which regularly induce causal fallacies. Researchers who employ QCA-CS or QCA-IS in empirical analyses thus always risk moving further away from the truth rather than closer to it. For more details, visit the article’s website.