ThSQCA: Threshold-Sweep Qualitative Comparative Analysis in R

Abstract

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) requires researchers to choose calibration and dichotomization thresholds, and these choices can substantially affect truth tables, minimization, and resulting solution formulas. Despite this dependency, threshold sensitivity is often examined only in an ad hoc manner because repeated analyses are time-intensive and error-prone. We present ThSQCA, an R package that automates threshold-sweep analyses by treating thresholds as explicit analytical variables. It provides four sweep functions (otSweep, ctSweepS, ctSweepM, dtSweep) to explore outcome thresholds, single-condition thresholds, multi-condition threshold grids, and joint outcome-condition threshold spaces, respectively. ThSQCA integrates with the established CRAN package QCA for truth table construction and Boolean minimization, while returning structured S3 objects with consistent print/summary methods and optional detailed results. The package also supports automated Markdown report generation and configuration-chart output to facilitate reproducible documentation of cross-threshold results.

27 pages, 2 figures, 7 tables. R package available on CRAN (https://cran.r-project.org/package=ThSQCA). v5: package renamed from TSQCA to ThSQCA (v2.0.0, now available on CRAN); updated all URLs and version numbers