Studying Complex Interactions and Outcomes Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis: A Practical Guide to Comparative Case Studies and Ethnographic Data Analysis

Studying Complex Interactions and Outcomes Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis: A Practical Guide to Comparative Case Studies and Ethnographic Data Analysis offers practical, methodological, and theoretically robust guidelines to systematically study the causalities, dynamics, and outcomes of complex social interactions in multiple source data sets. It demonstrates how to convert data from multisited ethnography of investment politics, mobilizations, and citizen struggles into a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). In this book, Markus Kröger focuses on how data collected primarily via multisited political ethnography, supplemented by other materials and verified by multiple forms of triangulation, can be systematically analyzed through QCA. The results of this QCA offer insight on how to study the political and economic outcomes in natural resource conflicts, across different contexts and political systems. This book applies the method in practice using examples from the author’s own research. With a focus on social movement studies, it shows how QCA can be used to analyze a multiple data source database, that includes results from multiple case studies. This book is a practical guide for researchers and students in social movement studies and other disciplines that produce ethnographic data from multiple sources on how to analyze complex databases through the QCA.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. 1: Systematic Data Collection and Analysis: Multi-Sited Political Ethnography, QCA, and Other Methods for Assessing Complex Causalities. 2: Studying Complex Interactions and Outcomes: Selecting Key Factors in Social Movement Studies. 3: How to Apply QCA? An Illustration Through a QCA Of Investment Politics Outcomes in Brazil and India. 4: Complementing QCA by a Detailed Opening of Explanatory Factors. Conclusions References. Index

About the Author :
Markus Kröger is an Associate Professor in Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and an Academy of Finland Research Fellow. He is a founding member of the Global Extractivisms and Alternatives Initiative (EXALT). His research interests include Brazilian studies, global natural resource politics, and social movement strategies and economic outcomes.

Review :
"This innovative book provides concrete procedures to bridge deep, case-based knowledge and QCA, thereby also combining the strengths of ethnographic research and systematic cross-case comparison. A must read for case-oriented researchers feeling the urge to ‘go comparative’… and for comparativists feeling the urge to ‘go back to cases’." - Benoît Rihoux, University of Louvain (Belgium) and COMPASSS international network (compasss.org) "Through his detailed description of a research process, Markus Kröger impressively shows how to apply QCA in the field of political ethnography. The book should also be read by researchers who want to take advantage of QCA as a tool for comparative studies including a small number of cases." - Lasse Cronqvist, Senior Lecturer, University of Trier "Markus Kröger convincingly demonstrates a key feature of QCA—that it is much more than a data analytic technique. It is inherently multi-method, as it incorporates case-level knowledge into the analysis of cross-case patterns, and vice versa. Kröger offers a practical, step-by-step guide to the interplay of methods integral to QCA, which researchers new to the approach and seasoned QCA users alike can learn from." - Charles Ragin, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine