Capturing the logic and practice of QCA

This chapter demonstrates how critical realism legitimizes and informs QCAs interpretive approach. The chapter thus presents a crucial heuristic for QCA researchers. It explains how critical realist metaphysics (ontology, epistemology) differ fundamentally from those of correlational methods. The chapter explains how QCA ‘negotiates’ critical realism’s three domains of reality (the Real, the Actual and the Empirical). Causal powers (which ‘reside’ in the domain of the Real), when exercised by human agents, ‘produce’ events (in the domain of the Actual). Researchers interpret events into analytically relevant cases and develop knowledge of them (in the domain of the Empirical). This knowledge they interpret into claims about causal powers (in the domain of the Real).