Critical Tension: Sufficiency and Parsimony in QCA

Adrian Dușa

Sociological Methods & Research, 2022, vol. 51, issue 2, 541-565

Abstract: The main objective of the qualitative comparative analysis is to find solutions that display sufficient configurations of causal conditions leading to the presence of an outcome. These solutions should be less complex than the original observed configurations, as parsimonious as possible, without sacrificing the sufficiency requirement. Sufficiency and parsimony are two requirements that act in opposition, and an optimal solution is one that accommodates both. There are different search strategies that lead to different types of solutions, with an ongoing debate about which solution type is closest to the true, underlying causal structure. This article presents the different logics behind each simplification system in order to explain how and why they lead to different results and introduces the concept of “robust sufficiency†to clear the debate. It analyses the correctness ratios for the different solution type and provides an improved set of procedures to measure correctness that captures the best features from each system. Out of the competition between the conservative and the parsimonious search strategies, the intermediate solution emerges as the best hybrid that is suitable for causal analysis, outperforming the parsimonious solution in recovering a known (even parsimonious) causal structure.

Keywords: qualitative comparative analysis; Boolean algebra; material implication; method evaluation; causal inference; set theoretic methods; robust sufficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0049124119882456 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:somere:v:51:y:2022:i:2:p:541-565

DOI: 10.1177/0049124119882456

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Methods & Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().