We are pleased to announce the launch of the annual QCA Conference of the Americas. Organized by Claude Rubinson (U Houston-Downtown), Peer Fiss (U Southern California) and Gary Goertz (Notre Dame), the inaugural meeting will be held April 6-8, 2022 at the University of Houston-Downtown. Charles Ragin (UC Irvine) and James Mahoney (Northwestern) will deliver the keynote addresses.

Responding to the growing interest in understanding causally complex phenomena in a configurational and comparative manner, AQCA will provide a venue for the broad, cross-disciplinary community of QCA empirical researchers and methodologists to gather together to present and receive feedback on current research projects, share theoretical and methodological developments, and discuss new directions in configurational-comparative research practices. AQCA offers a supportive environment for the diverse QCA community to meet, engage in dialogue, network, learn, and collectively move forward on advancing the configurational-comparative perspective.

AQCA will be a broad-tent, inclusive, and diverse venue that is open to everyone interested in learning about, using, and advancing the configurational-comparative perspective. Whatever your field or topic, if you use QCA and/or other configurational-comparative methods or if you are considering using them, then AQCA is for you. Whether your work is empirical, methodological, or theoretical; whether you are a seasoned practitioner or have just discovered the configurational-comparative approach, we hope that you will join us for three days of lively discussions, debates, community building, and learning.

We hope that you will join us in April. For more details and to review our call for abstracts (due date: January 31, 2022), please visit the AQCA website at https://compasss.org/aqca/.

Patrick A. Mello (Technical University of Munich) has published Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application (Georgetown University Press, 2021).

Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application is a comprehensive guide to QCA. As QCA becomes increasingly popular across the social sciences, this textbook teaches students, scholars, and self-learners the fundamentals of the method, research design, interpretation of results, and how to communicate findings.

Following an ideal typical research cycle, the book’s ten chapters cover the methodological basis and analytical routine of QCA, as well as matters of research design, causation and causal complexity, QCA variants, and the method’s reception in the social sciences. A comprehensive glossary helps to clarify the meaning of frequently used terms. The book is complemented by an accessible online R manual to help new users to practice QCA’s analytical steps on sample data and then implement with their own findings. This hands-on textbook is an essential resource for students and researchers looking for a complete and up-to-date introduction to QCA.