The Logic and Methodology of “Necessary but Not Sufficient Causalityâ€: A Comment on Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA)*

Alrik Thiem

Sociological Methods & Research, 2021, vol. 50, issue 2, 913-925

Abstract: Necessary condition analysis (NCA) has recently been proposed to researchers in business, management, organization, psychology, sociology, and even medicine as a new data analysis tool for identifying necessary but insufficient causes of an outcome. In this comment, I demonstrate that NCA is inadequate for performing such inferences. The reason is a mismatch between the method’s purported search target and its actual output. Moreover, I show that, even if its output corresponded to its search target, the method of qualitative comparative analysis would always outperform NCA in all relevant respects.

Keywords: necessary condition analysis; qualitative comparative analysis; INUS theory; Boolean methods; configurational comparative methods; inverse search; method evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:somere:v:50:y:2021:i:2:p:913-925

DOI: 10.1177/0049124118782548

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