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Capturing Community Context through Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Case Studies

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Notes

  1. In the community science literature, communities usually refer to small-scale administrative units such as village, small town/city, census tract, and county. See Luke (2005) and Qin and Flint (2010) for more detailed discussions on methods that can be used to analyze community context.

  2. Recent extensions of the QCA technique also enable the inclusion of multi-value categorical variables and fuzzy degrees of membership (fuzzy sets) in the analysis (Ragin 2000; Vink and van Vliet 2009).

  3. The coding of selected case studies originally included several other variables including market integration, community control/ownership of forests, population size, attitude outcome, and behavioral outcome. Given the primary goal of this study, these variables were excluded from the example analysis for the ease of interpretation of the QCA results.

  4. To an extent, the example analysis confirmed the important role of community interactional capacity building in CBFM practices (as first suggested by Flint et al. 2008). While the example analysis can be considered as a meta-analysis of CBFM projects, the results are not directly comparable to those of previous meta-studies on this topic (e.g., Brooks et al. 2013; Glasmeier and Farrigan 2005; Pagdee et al. 2006) due to different research purposes and scopes.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is based on a larger research project conducted jointly by students and instructor in a graduate topics course at the University of Missouri-Columbia (RU_SOC 8447 Seminar on Contemporary Issues in Rural Sociology – Community, Natural Resources and Sustainability, Fall 2015 Semester). The authors would like to acknowledge and thank Jordan Shroyer and Stephanie Link for their contributions to the class project. The paper was presented in a specially organized session (Extractive and Energy Industries, Inequality, and Social Responses) at the 79th Annual Meeting of the Rural Sociological Society in Toronto, Canada, August 7–10, 2016. Thoughtful comments from the session participants, anonymous reviewers, and the journal editor on earlier versions of this article are also sincerely appreciated. The work of Hua Qin in this research was partially supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch Projects #1005128 and #1005129.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Applied Social Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia, 216 Gentry Hall, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA

    Hua Qin, Yubing Fan, Andrea Tappmeyer, Kathlee Freeman, Elizabeth Prentice & Xinyu Gao

  2. Department of Sociology, Hohai University, Nanjing, China

    Xinyu Gao

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  1. Hua Qin
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Qin, H., Fan, Y., Tappmeyer, A. et al. Capturing Community Context through Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Case Studies. Hum Ecol 45, 103–109 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-016-9889-7

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