Necessary Condition Analysis: Theory and Practice Summer School
Aims
After successful completion of this online course you will be able to:
1. Understand the logic of necessary conditions.
2. Understand why necessary conditions are important for (social) science.
3. Understand why necessary condition are important for practice.
4. Identify and formulate necessary conditions in (your own) theory.
5. Identify and test necessary conditions in (your own) data sets.
6. Write an extended abstract in which you use necessity logic and apply NCA.
Information
Participants
The course is designed for PhD candidates and junior faculty who are aiming for publications in top journals. Other researchers interested in this emerging approach—including senior faculty—are also welcome to take this course. We expect that each participant has at least some experience with regression analysis to understand the differences between NCA and regression, and to appreciate how NCA complements regression. Researchers with a background in Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) can also benefit from the course to appreciate how NCA complements QCA. No special methodological or substantive knowledge is required for this course. Examples will be drawn from different research fields.
Material and platform used
We will use the following textbook in this course: Dul, J. (2020) Conducting Necessary Condition Analysis. Mastering Business Research Methods series, London: Sage Publications. Sage Publications. Each participant is supposed to have access to this book.
Each participant is expected to work on a computer with a Windows (Microsoft) or iOS (Apple) operating system. For the exercises with the NCA software the participant must have installed the free programming software R on their computer (help will be provided) but the exercises can be done without prior programming knowledge or experience with R or otherwise. More information about the software can be found on the NCA website.
Zoom will be used for online sessions. Participants will be granted access to ERIM’s learning management platform CANVAS, where all additional supporting documents, assignments and meeting links can be found.
Credits
The official workload of the course is 1 ECTS (28 hours). You will receive formal proof of the completion of the course if you have made properly all assignments and participated actively during online discussion sessions.
Dates and Location
The main course week starts June 20 and ends June 25. Every day of this week there are voluntary or mandatory meetings. Before and during this week the participants are expected to make assignments. All meetings are online. There are no meetings on campus. The three mandatory online meetings last 1½ hours and are planned on June 21, 22, and 24, each starting at 10am or 17pm (Central European Summer Time = CEST Time) depending upon your group. During the application for this course you can indicate your preferred mandatory meeting time (the same selected time for all mandatory meetings; switching is not possible).
Online meetings
There are three types of online meetings:
- Mandatory online discussion meetings. These group meetings include lectures, plenary group discussions and breakout sessions. They are meant to discuss the assignments.
- Voluntary online Q&A meetings. These sessions are meant to support participants to make their assignments.
- A voluntary individual meeting after the course week to receive personal feedback on the final assignment.
Assessment
Pass/fail evaluation by lecturer based on the quality of the final assignment, quality of the preparations and active participation during online discussion sessions.
Materials
We will use the following textbook in this course: Dul, J. (2020) Conducting Necessary Condition Analysis. Mastering Business Research Methods series, London: Sage Publications. Sage Publications. Each participant is supposed to have access to this book.
Additional info
For the timetable of this course, please click here. The timetable is in the local time of Rotterdam, which is CEST (UTC+02:00).
This course is given in a fully online format.
Please choose for Group 2 of this course, if you are also taking Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA): A set-analytic approach to studying organizational configurations and/or Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Modeling.
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Registration
To register for this course, please fill in the registration form.
ERIM PhD candidates and ERIM faculty members also need to make use of the above mentioned link.
Please note that the number of places for this course is limited. In case the number of registrations exceeds the number of available seats, priority is given to ERIM RM students and PhD candidates.
This course is free of charge for ERIM members (PhD candidates and faculty members) and Part-time PhD candidates of RSM. For external participants, the course fee is 250 euro.
