Social science studies of bioethics demonstrate that ethics are highly contextual, functioning differently across local settings as actors make daily decisions “on the ground.” Sociological studies that demonstrate the key role organizations play in shaping ethical decision-making have...

As originally developed by Charles Ragin in The Comparative Method (1987), qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) has been used extensively by comparative and historical sociologists as an effective tool for analyzing data sets of medium-N populations. Like many other methods, however, QCA is...

The problem of selecting independent variables for qualitiative comparative analysis (QCA) is addressed. This is a different problem for QCA than for inferential statistical methods, for both technical and epistemological reasons. Technically, QCA can manipulate only a few variables at one time....