QCA: A Package for Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Authors

Alrik Thiem, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ)
Adrian Duşa, University of Bucharest

Date of this Version

6-2013

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (June 2013) 5(1); Editor: Hadley Wickham

Comments

Copyright 2013, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported

Abstract

We present QCA, a package for performing Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). QCA is becoming increasingly popular with social scientists, but none of the existing software alternatives covers the full range of core procedures. This gap is now filled by QCA. After a mapping of the method’s diffusion, we introduce some of the package’s main capabilities, including the calibration of crisp and fuzzy sets, the analysis of necessity relations, the construction of truth tables and the derivation of complex,parsimonious and intermediate solutions.