Sociological Methods & Research http://smr.sagepub.com/
Fuzzy Sets and Social Research
Charles C. Ragin and Paul Pennings Sociological Methods & Research 2005 33: 423 DOI: 10.1177/0049124105274499 The online version of this article can be found at: http://smr.sagepub.com/content/33/4/423
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Fuzzy Sets and Social Research
CHARLES C. RAGIN
University of Arizona, Tucson
PAUL PENNINGS
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
This special issue of Sociological Methods & Research presents four in-depth methodological discussions of the use of fuzzy sets in social research. They have in common that they confront and compare fuzzy set methods with mainstream techniques. These contributions should not be read as introductions to fuzzy set analysis (see Smithson 1987; Ragin 2000) but as attempts to validate this new methodology and demonstrate some of its strengths by comparing it with established approaches. In brief, fuzzy sets extend Boolean or “crisp” sets by permitting membership scores in the interval between 0 and 1. With crisp sets, cases are perceived only as members or nonmembers of a set. The problem is that many core concepts in social research are best understood as graded sets. Examples include such dichotomies as coordinated versus uncoordinated economies, national versus international politics, the public versus the private sector, states versus markets, consensus versus majoritarian systems, democratic versus nondemocratic, federal versus nonfederal, employed...
