Institution: see Organisers & Supporters

Programme of study: International Research Workshop

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Sven Hauff (Helmut-Schmidt-University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg)

Date: see Workshop Programme

Max. number of participants: 20

Credit Points: 5 CP for participating in the whole IRWS

Language of instruction: English

Contents: Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA )is a novel, user-friendly methodological approach, that understands cause-effect relations as “necessary but not sufficient” (in contrast to additive logic used in regression). A necessary condition implies that without the right level of the condition a certain effect cannot occur. This is independent of other causes, thus the necessary condition can be a bottleneck, critical factor, constraint, disqualifier, etc. In practice, the right level of a necessary condition must be put and kept in place to avoid guaranteed failure. Other causes cannot compensate for this factor. Thus, NCA provides a novel view on causality and on empirical data analysis. In the first part of the workshop we will discuss the differences between necessity logic and traditional additive logic and describe the relevance of necessary conditions for theory and practice. The second part of the workshop is a demonstration of the application of NCA in theory building and testing, including performing a necessary condition analysis with the NCA software.

Pre-readings:

Dul, J. (2016) Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA): Logic and methodology of “necessary but not sufficient” causality. Organizational Research Methods 19(1), 10-52. [free access]

Dul, J., van der Laan, E., Kuik, R. (2018). A statistical significance test for Necessary Condition Analysis. Organizational Research Methods [free access]

You have to register for the International Research Workshop to participate in this course.