This summer I’ll be offering a workshop on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), as part of the Summer School in Social Science Methods at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano. This will be the 5th time that I’m holding a QCA workshop in Lugano (on previous courses, see here). The workshop runs for a full week and covers the entire research design cycle of QCA with R and its packages, including the application and interpretation of findings and advanced topics such as multi-method research, addressing critiques and peer reviews, and increasing the robustness of one’s study. There are also opportunities for the presentation of own work and individual consultation on QCA research design. The workshop is based on my textbook Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application, published with Georgetown University Press (2021), see also the online content hosted on Harvard Dataverse. In case you’re interested in participating in this workshop but have questions about it, please feel free to contact me.

Edited by Patrick A. Mello and Falk Ostermann

On December 26, the Routledge Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis Methods was published (co-edited with Falk Ostermann, Kiel University). The handbook contains 34 chapters and a foreword from 46 international contributors, covering a diverse range of new and established methods of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Embracing methodological pluralism and a belief in the value of an open discussion about methods’ assumptions and diverging positions, it provides new, state-of-the-art research approaches, as well as introductions to a range of established methods. Each chapter follows the same structured approach, introducing the method and its development, discussing strengths, requirements, limitations, and potential pitfalls while illustrating the method’s application using examples from empirical research. For more information on the book, including an excerpt from the foreword by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and book endorsements from Charles F. Hermann, Margaret G. Hermann, Stéphanie Hofmann, Juliet Kaarbo, and Atsushi Tago, please see this page.

On December 13-15, I participated virtually in the 10th International QCA Expert Workshop and the 6th International QCA Paper Development Workshop at ETH Zurich and online. As in previous years, the event was organized by Manuel Fischer, Julia Leib, Johannes Meuer, Sofia Pagliarin, Ryan Michael Rumble, and Christian Rupietta. The QCA Expert Workshop brought together a group of 36 QCA experts and practitioners from around the globe, many of whom participated online to discuss methodological innovations and new empirical applications. One highlight was Charles Ragin’s presentation on his forthcoming book Analytic Induction (to be published in 2023). The preceding QCA Paper Development Workshop was the 6th event of this kind, which included more than a dozen roundtables and breakout rooms where 36 applied QCA papers were presented and discussed. I co-chaired a Q&A session with Seweryn Krupnik (Jagiellonian University) and Martin Schneider (Paderborn University), and Seweryn and I also co-chaired a roundtable at the Paper Development Workshop.