Theoretical aspects of Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA)

Fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) is a methodology for obtaining linguistic summarizations from data that are associated with cases. It has recently been described as a collection of 13 steps [7]. In this paper we focus on how to greatly speed up some of the computationally intensive steps of fsQCA and show how to use the speed-up equations to obtain some interesting and important properties of fsQCA. These properties not only provide additional understanding about fsQCA, but also lead to different ways to implement fsQCA. One of the properties is so important (Section 8) that unless its results are adopted, when a variable is described by more than one term (e.g., Low and High), fsQCA will provide incorrect results. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.