EXCEPT project presented at the 3rd International Qualitative Comparative Analyses Workshop
On the 2-3rd of December Triin Lauri, Tallinn University, participated in the 3rd International QCA Expert Workshop in Zurich which was hosted by ETF Zurich.
QCA Expert Workshop brought together 20-30 researchers working with Qualitative Comparative Analyses (QCA) across and beyond the neighbouring areas of political sciences, sociology, management, and economics by providing forum for cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas, knowledge and expertise.
Triin introduced her analyses on social exclusion of youth in Europe conducted for the EXCEPT project WP4. More specifically the research task is to explain configurational patterns of countries’ institutional mix of labour market policies and to explore the success of these patterns to increase the life-satisfaction of young unemployed. Configurational relationship is one of the main distinguishers between statistical and set-theoretic methods, among which is also QCA. This approach has its advantages especially in case of diversity while neither the independent effects nor single causal model based explanations give robust answers.
QCA is founded by Charles Ragin who also participated in the seminar. There were both methodology-driven and policy-evaluative type of papers presented during these two days. Methodological discussions were thorough, passionate and reflective as were the evaluative papers. And last but not least – the latest software developments were introduced by developers among which the R version of QCA GUI was really impressive and promising.
It was great pleasure to have the opportunity to participate in this seminar, to introduce and discuss our project and to build network among QCA community. Not to mention to meet the guru Ragin himself! :)
The analysis will be elaborated on and finalised in the coming spring semester and will be presented at the EXCEPT seminars to complement the statistical and in-depth interviews.
