Recommended Reading

Ragin, C (2008) Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

This is Ragin’s latest comprehensive offering, focusing on set-theoretic thinking and fuzzy set analysis. It is not a guide to the use of his own software, fsQCA, although there are selected instructions at the end of some of the chapters.

Ragin, C. (2008) User’s Guide to Fuzzy-Set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis.

This is the guide that comes with the software if you download it. It tells you what all the buttons do, but there is little help on how to interpret the results.

Ragin, C. (2009) ‘Qualitative comparative analysis using fuzzy sets’, in B. Rihoux and C. Ragin (eds), Configurational Comparative Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

This focuses on using fsQCA to analyse the survival of democracy data which is referred to in Kent (2015). Again, it is not a manual on how to use the software.

Schneider, C.Q. and Wagemann, C. (2012) Set-Theoretic Methods for the Social Sciences: A Guide to Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This is a comprehensive guide to set-theoretic methods and to the use of configurational data analysis. It covers both the basics and more advanced aspects. It is not a manual on how to use fsQCA, but explains very carefully what it does and does not do. If you want to pick just one book to follow up on Chapter 7 in Kent (2015), then this is the one to go for. There is an online appendix which is a guide to the use of software, including fsQCA, but, in fact, relatively little space is devoted to this software. Most of it focuses on using Stata and R.