During our end-of-conference open discussion forum at AQCA2026 in Cincinnati, a number of participants expressed their desire for a “checklist” for QCA projects. While I’ve batted around the idea before, I’ve always demurred. I’m concerned that offering such a product might encourage mechanistic approaches to conducting and presenting QCA. QCA is a dynamic method, which should be reflected in its presentation. And yet, I recognize that as I review QCA projects, there are certain common that I am looking for. I therefore offer this checklist as an enumeration of those common elements, not simply what I am looking for but, more importantly, why. I hope that members of the QCA community—authors, reviewers, editors—will find this piece useful and I welcome your feedback.
Registration is now open for the 5th Annual QCA Conference of the Americas, to be hosted by the Carl H. Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati. Complete details are on our conference website, and you can register for the conference via CARMA.
Event is organized for researchers working in various domains who seek constructive feedback on their QCA-based projects and papers. The event is open to researchers at any stage of their QCA journey (an early or more advanced).
The 5th Annual QCA Conference of the Americas (AQCA2026) will be held March 18-20, 2026 at the Carl H. Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati, USA. See https://compasss.org/aqca/ for the call for proposals, registration process, conference program, and complete details.
The QCA Conference of the Americas (AQCA) provides a venue for the broad, cross-disciplinary community of researchers and practitioners working with configurational-comparative methods and approaches 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. Bringing together the diverse set of QCA empirical and methodological researchers, AQCA offers a supportive environment for the community to meet, engage in dialogue, network, learn, and collectively move forward on advancing the configurational-comparative perspective.
A quick reminder that early bird registration ends this week for the 4th Annual QCA Conference of the Americas (AQCA2025). The link to register is: https://carmattu.com/aqca2025/
The 4th Annual QCA Conference of the Americas (AQCA2025) will be held April 2-4, 2025 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, USA. See https://compasss.org/aqca/ for the call for proposals, registration process, conference program, and complete details.
The QCA Conference of the Americas (AQCA) provides a venue for the broad, cross-disciplinary community of researchers and practitioners working with configurational-comparative methods and approaches 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. Bringing together the diverse set of QCA empirical and methodological researchers, AQCA offers a supportive environment for the community to meet, engage in dialogue, network, learn, and collectively move forward on advancing the configurational-comparative perspective.
Wenyan Song, Yi Han and Robert Sroufe have been recognized by Emerald Publishing for their paper “Substitution and complementarity dynamics in configurations of sustainable management practices,” (International Journal of Operations and Production Management, 2022). In the paper, the authors use QCA to understand the relationship between sustainable management practices and financial performance.
The third annual QCA Conference of the Americas will be held in March 2024 at Northwestern University in Chicago. Registrations fees have been posted (we’ve kept the fees the same as last year) and registration will open soon.
We’ve also posted information on traveling to Northwestern, along with the link for booking at Hyatt House Chicago/Evanston, the official conference hotel.
Charles Ragin has published a research note on dual calibration, a heretofore undocumented function in the fs/QCA software. Dual calibration applies the direct method but uses four threshold values, allowing one to construct two fuzzy sets from a single variable, simultaneously calibrating “high-X versus not-high-X” and “low-X versus not-low-X.”
