Qualitative comparative analysis QCA is a technique originally developed by Charles Ragin in the field of political science. It accepts data sets from the problem of interest, and applies the rules of logical inference to determine the relations between combinations of variables and outcomes, which helps researchers validate hypotheses or discover new implications. However, existing QCA approaches or tools have limited capacities in handling multivalued explanatory and outcome variables, as well as in outputting compact results for human analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel QCA approach, which can deal with multivalued variables and support more complicated analysis. Our approach enables 1 multi-value reduction of candidate rules; and 2 effective counterfactual analysis associated with expert knowledge. We also implemented a new tool called fully functional multi-value QCA fm-QCA. Through the evaluation, our tool outperforms existing state-of-the-art QCA tools in producing more compact analysis results as well as discovering more inferences.
['Ke Wu', 'Shiping Tang', 'Geguang Pu', 'Min Wu', 'Ting Su']
Fm-QCA: A Novel Approach to Multi-value Qualitative Comparative Analysis