The Possibility Principle: Choosing Negative Cases in Comparative Research
By James Mahoney, Gary Goertz. American Political Science Review, 2004
448 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bc9d57c7e6fe7952fa2065ead6d101845580fe09
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Sociology and Political Science
- I. Rohlfing
- Ruth V. Aguilera
- Carsten Q. Schneider
- Thomas Greckhamer
- Peer C. Fiss
- Santi Furnari
- Claudius Wagemann
- Randi A. Engle
In Strategy and Management
- Thomas Greckhamer
- Ruth V. Aguilera
- Randi A. Engle
- Santi Furnari
- I. Rohlfing
- Carsten Q. Schneider
- Jack S. Levy
- Peer C. Fiss
Citations in the corpus
- Standards of Good Practice in Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Fuzzy-Sets (2010, background): “; Collier, Mahoney, and Seawright 2004; Mahoney and Goertz 2004; Morlino 2005:51ff .”
- Case Studies: Types, Designs, and Logics of Inference (2008, background): “…tracing, unlike large-N and cross-case comparative work, is not susceptible to the problem of selecting cases on the dependent variable, because process tracing follows a different logic of inference (Collier et al., 2004: 96; George & Bennett, 2005: 22–25; Bennett and Elman, 2006: 460–463).”
- Comparative Hypothesis Testing Via Process Tracing (2014, background): “See Mahoney and Goertz (2004) for positive and negative cases.”
- Assessing the Trivialness, Relevance, and Relative Importance of Necessary or Sufficient Conditions in Social Science (2006, background): “In general, this would not be a good idea since the (~X, ~Y) cell is often problematic, see Mahoney and Goertz (2004) for an extensive discussion.”
- Combining QCA and Process Tracing in Set-Theoretic Multi-Method Research (2013, background): “First, the population of cases has been misspecified and the case should be excluded (Mahoney and Goertz 2004; Ragin 2000: chap.”
- Studying configurations with qualitative comparative analysis: Best practices in strategy and organization research (2018, background): “…et al., 2015; Haxhi and Aguilera, 2017), (2) a sample of “representative cases” from this larger population, and (3) a combination of “positive cases” that display the outcome and “negative cases” that could be expected to display the outcome but do not (Mahoney and Goertz, 2004; Ragin, 2000).”
- Comparative Research (2006, background): “Conversely, although given or taken-for-granted populations are seemingly objective, they may contain many irrelevant cases that significantly impact the results (Mahoney and Goertz, 2004).”
- Framing Interactions to Foster Generative Learning: A Situative Explanation of Transfer in a Community of Learners Classroom (2006, methodology): “Given that, it will be important in future work to use methodologies like comparative case study designs (Dion, 1998; Mahoney & Goertz, 1994; Yin, 1989) and experimental and quasi-experimental studies (Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002) to better distinguish between possible explanatory mechanisms…”