<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: useful place to start but by no means the final story
Review: There are two aspects to Ragin's book. The first part of the book is really an update of his general methodological program first set forth in The Comparative Method. It does add some new things to the older material and is thus worth the look. Ragin has some important points to make and deserves to be paid careful attention by social scientists of both qualitative and quantitative traditions. The second part is a relatively gentle--too gentle in my view--introduction to fuzzy set theory as well as to some applications to social scientific problems that can be addressed with FST. This is useful since it won't put readers off with lots of heavy math they're unlikely to understand. However, the presentation of FST in this book is weak. IMO the worst deficiency is that it lacks cites to more detailed literature that would be necessary for anyone who wanted to apply FST to real problems. Read this but you really need to see Michael Smithson's alas now quite rare Fuzzy Set Analysis for Behavioral and Social Sciences... which isn't cited in Ragin.
<< 1 >>
| 
