Intersectional Inequality Race, Class, Test Scores, and Poverty

"Investigates which combinations of causally relevant conditions are linked to specific outcomes, using a diversity-oriented, intersectional understanding of such connections and focusing on the predictors of poverty status."-- "Journal of Economic Literature" "This is a breakthrough book. Ragin's substantial corpus of research has demonstrated how QCA and related methods can be used with small and moderate size data sets. In this new research with Fiss, he shows how these methods cannot only be applied to large data sets, but to a central problem of sociology--the prediction of poverty. In doing so, they demonstrate that their methods can provide new insights that are wholly missed by regression and related methods."-- "Christopher Winship, Harvard University" "Intersectional Inequality makes an original and substantive contribution to the Bell Curve debate, offering a methodological guide to those who wish to apply set theoretic methods to survey data. This is one of those very rare books that offers genuine innovation. Its combination of substantive and methodological material and argument is increasingly rare--and I welcome it as the sort of book that will educate students about what social science at its best can offer and also provide a model of the configurational approach for other researchers to follow."-- "Barry Cooper, University of Durham"

Charles C. Ragin is Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books, including Redesigning Social Inquiry, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Peer C. Fiss is associate professor of management and organization at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He is coeditor of Configurational Theory and Methods in Organizational Research.