The Civil Society Workshop will meet on Thursday, March 1, at 12:30 pm for a discussion with
Bin Chen, Associate Professor, the Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management in the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, CUNY
“Determinants of the Size and Scope of Lead-Organization Networks for Social Service Delivery: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis Approach”
Abstract: This presentation first provides a brief overview of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Increasingly popular in social science research, QCA is an analytical approach and technique that examines the relationships between conditions (the counterparts of explanatory variables in regression analysis) and an outcome using set theory. This presentation highlights three major ways that distinguish QCA from the multivariate regression-based approach. First, QCA identifies configurations of conditions that contribute to the outcome rather than assuming linear and addictive effects of explanatory variables on the outcome. Second, by examining all logical combinations of conditions against empirical data, QCA enables identification of potentially multiple configurations that lead to the outcome and the absence of the outcome, thus shedding light on alternative pathways (or “recipes”). Third, QCA is best to be used for analyzing medium “N” cases (20 to 100). These three features of QCA are then especially relevant to the following study on lead-organization networks.
A network formed by a lead organization has been a popular mode of delivering publicly funded social services. In a typical lead-organization network, a public or a nonprofit organization receives a prime contract of service delivery from a government agency, partners with other service providers through subcontracting, and then form a community-based network. As a hybrid model of mandated and self-organizing networks, a question remains on how a lead-organization network model can be consequential in terms of a meaningful sharing of resources and subsequently developing and strengthening network capacity. The empirical cases included 27 community-based family preservation networks in an urban county in the West Coast of the United States. Professor Chen employed a fuzzy-set QCA to address a research question: what configurations of necessary and sufficient factors influence the consequential and lack of consequential lead-organization networks for social service delivery? The analysis identifies four configurations of factors that lead to the consequential networks and the other different four configurations of factors associated with the absence of consequential networks.
We will meet in the Sociology Department, room 6112.01
