József Mezei (Åbo Akademi University) and Shahrokh Nikou (Åbo Akademi University and Stockholm University) are organizing a QCA minitrack for HICSS (Jan 3-6, 2024). Submissions are due by June 15, 2023. Please see the call for papers for details.

In this hybrid symposium, a panel of scholars discuss James Mahoney’s recent book, The Logic of Social Science.  The book develops a scientific constructivist approach that uses set-theoretic analysis to avoid essentialist biases in the production of knowledge. This scientific constructivist approach recognizes that social categories depend on collective understandings for their existence, but it insists that this recognition need not hinder the use of explicit procedures for the rational assessment of truth. Mahoney argues that set-theoretic analysis enables scholars to avoid the pitfalls of essentialism and produce findings that rest on a firm scientific foundation.

All speakers will participate online; you are invited to attend online or in person at Central European University, where the symposium will be followed by a wine and cheese reception.

https://events.ceu.edu/2023-05-25/set-theory-constructivism-and-science-symposium-james-mahoneys-logic-social-science

In Fall of 2022, Lasse Gerrits and Sofia Pagliarin, both of the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, organized the first Time-in-QCA (TiQ) workshop. They have now produced a corresponding report of the workshop. More than just reviewing the workshop itself, this report is essential reading for anybody interested in longitudinal QCA: it summarizes existing conceptualizations of the relationships among time and QCA, provides a high-level overview of methodological techniques for incorporating time and process into QCA, and identifies avenues and areas for future exploration.

Report of the first ‘Time-in-QCA’ (TiQ) International Workshop

Stefan Breet and Professor Jan Dul (the founder of Necessary Condition Analysis) are excited to announce a week-long summer course on Necessary Condition Analysis. The one-week summer course will take place from June 26, 2023 till June 30, 2023 at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. It is part of the 2nd Summer School in Social Research Methods organized by MethodsNet. For information or to sign up for the course visit Radboud Summer School website and fill out the application form.

Roel Rutten (Tilburg University) and Claude Rubinson (University of Houston-Downtown) have produced a QCA glossary, available on the Tutorials and Guides page of the COMPASSS website.

Registration for AQCA2023 is now open.  Travel and lodging information has also been posted.  Go to https://compasss.org/aqca/ for complete details.

An online course about Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) is now available on the Coursera website for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The course is freely available for anyone who wants to learn about NCA. This beginners’ course includes 29 videos and is organized in 5 weeks:

1. Introduction to NCA
2. Setting up an NCA study
3. Data analysis with NCA
4. Reporting the results of NCA
5. Advanced topics of NCA.

NCA can be used as a stand-alone method, in combination with regression-based methods, or in combination with QCA. The course can be accessed via the following link: https://www.coursera.org/learn/necessary-condition-analysis

“Intergenerational Transmission of Education: Set-Theoretic Exploration of Accumulation of Social Advantages and Disadvantages in Six European Countries” by Triin Lauri (Tallinn University) and Ellu Saar (Tallinn University).

The aim of the paper is to investigate the patterns of multiple advantages and disadvantages of parental resources measured by educational attainment of both parents as well as parental cultural resources and their impact on the educational attainment of offspring across three cohorts in six European countries – the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. We separate the examination of combined advantages from that of combined disadvantages to emphasise the asymmetries in these relationships by employing a novel configurational approach, set coincidence analysis introduced by Ragin and Fiss (2017). The analysis based on the International Assessment of Adult Competencies data (PIAAC) revealed substantial country differences in degrees of cumulative advantages and disadvantages of respondents’ parental resources and also in the linkages between these cumulative patterns and respondents’ educational attainment.

COMPASSS now has a YouTube page. Thanks to Sophia Pagliarin for spearheading this initiative! There are just two videos available now but we’d like to highlight talks by members of the COMPASSS community on QCA and related configurational-comparative methods. If you have a talk that you’d like us to host, please contact Claude.