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"Philosophers, lawyers, political, and social theorists debate normative concepts such as democracy, justice, human rights. Concepts are fundamental to description. Hence for anthropology, ethnography, grounded theory and similar methodologies developing concepts is a core theoretical and empirical activity. Concepts are thus core in causal theories, normative philosophy and empirical description. This book provides a unified framework for working with, constructing, and evaluating concepts that applies in these different domains."--

An innovative and accessible textbook on multimethod and case-study researchMultimethod research has become indispensable to doing social science, and is essential to anyone who conducts large-scale research projects in political science, sociology, education, comparative law, or business. This authoritative and accessible book offers the first truly comprehensive approach to multimethod and case-study research, and is particularly aimed at students of qualitative methods in the social sciences.Walking step-by-step through these cutting-edge tools and techniques, Gary Goertz introduces a new integrated approach that unites three corners of a powerful research triad—causal mechanisms, cross-case causal inference, and within-case causal inference. He explains how the investigation of causal mechanisms and the making of within-case causal inference are the central goals of multimethod and case study research, and provides a logic for connecting case studies and causal mechanism analysis with cross-case analysis, whether they are statistical analyses, experiments, or QCA. In addition, Goertz analyzes how one can generalize using case studies, as well as systematically test game-theoretic and other models using multiple case studies.Provides a fully integrated approach to multimethod and case-study researchAn essential resource for students and researchers in political science, sociology, education, law, and businessCovers constraint causal mechanism, game theory and case studies, QCA, and the use of case studies to systematically test and generalize theoriesAn ideal textbook for a first-year graduate course in methods or research design

Concepts lie at the core of social science theory and methodology. They provide substance to theories; they form the basis of measurement; they influence the selection of cases. Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide explores alternative means of concept construction and their impact on the role of concepts in measurement, case selection, and theories. While there exists a plethora of books on measurement, scaling, and the like, there are virtually no books devoted to the construction and analysis of concepts and their role in the research enterprise. Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide provides detailed and practical advice on the construction and use of social science concepts; a Web site provides classroom exercises. It uses a wide range of examples from political science and sociology such as revolution, welfare state, international disputes and war, and democracy to illustrate the theoretical and practical issues of concept construction and use. It explores the means of constructing complex, multilevel, and multidimensional concepts. In particular, it examines the classic necessary and sufficient condition approach to concept building and contrasts it with the family resemblance approach. The consequences of valid concept construction are explored in both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide will prove an indispensable guide for graduate students and scholars in the social sciences. More broadly, it will appeal to scholars in any field who wish to think more carefully about the concepts used to create theories and research designs. For Course Use: Social Science Concepts: A Users Guide has been written with classroom use in mind. Many of the chapters have been successfully taught at the Annual Training Institute on Qualitative Research Methods which is sponsored by the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods. Feedback from those experiences has been incorporated into the text. Each chapter provides useful, practical, and detailed advice on how to construct, evaluate, and use concepts. To make the volume more useful, an extensive set of classroom exercises is available from the author's Web page at http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ggoertz/social_science_concepts.html. These include questions about prominent published work on concepts, measures, and case selection; in addition there are logic exercises and questions regarding large-N applications

In this book Gary Goertz examines how states interact with their environment and contexts, which are important in understanding international politics. He presents a philosophical, methodological and empirical discussion of three important contexts which affect decision makers: history, system structure, and international norms. The effects of these contexts are explored by viewing context in turn as cause, as changing meaning, and as a barrier. The book engages with the literature on structural realism and international regimes, and uses rational actor and diffusion models as theoretical references. A number of concrete studies are provided using these contextual tools, including oil nationalisation, USSR-East European relations, enduring rivalries, and decolonisation. These empirical examples illustrate the fruitfulness of the contextual approach to international politics

David Freedman in his essay has called into question some of the advice given by Fearon-Laitin and Gerring in their chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology. I would like to second those criticisms and extend them in various ways. In particular, Freedman does not address in much detail the regression or logit model which underlies, explicitly or implicitly, both these chapters—and more generally Gerring's book on case study methodology (2007). This "regression approach" to case studies (to give it a name) informs much discussion about case studies and qualitative methods, going back to King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) and more recent works such as Lieberman (2005). In these few pages I can but sketch a rationale for choosing cases following a different logic of research. In the first part of the essay I address the choice of case studies from a qualitative logic of research. In the second part, I briefly describe a "descriptive–causal" approach to case study selection which is different from the regression logic of Fearon, Laitin, and Gerring.

This special issue of Political Analysis engages in a dialogue between qualitative and quantitative methods. It proposes that each has something to say to the other and more generally has a contribution to make to empirical social science.

Political scientists of all stripes have proposed numerous necessary or sufficient condition hypotheses. For methodologists a question is how can we assess the importance of these necessary conditions. This article addresses three central questions about the importance of necessary or sufficient conditions. The first concerns the "trivialness" of necessary or sufficient conditions. The second is how much a necessary or sufficient condition is "relevant?" The third important question deals with the relative importance of necessary or sufficient conditions: for example, if X1 & X2 are necessary or sufficient conditions, is one more important than the other? The article develops measures to assess the importance of necessary or sufficient conditions in three related contexts: (1) Venn diagrams, (2) 2 x 2 tables, & (3) fuzzy sets. Two empirical examples are discussed at length: (1) Skocpol's States & Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, & China & (2) Ragin's (2000) analysis of the causes of IMF riots. Adapted from the source document.