Intersectional Inequality

Race, Class, Test Scores, and Poverty

Ragin Charles C., Fiss Peer C.

For over twenty-five years, Charles C. Ragin has developed Qualitative Comparative Analysis and related set-analytic techniques as a means of bridging qualitative and quantitative methods of research. Now, with Peer C. Fiss, Ragin uses these impressive new tools to unravel the varied conditions affecting life chances. Ragin and Fiss begin by taking up the controversy regarding the relative importance of test scores versus socioeconomic background on life chances, a debate that has raged since the 1994 publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's "TheBell Curve". In contrast to prior work, Ragin and Fiss bring an intersectional approach to the evidence, analyzing the different ways that advantages and disadvantages combine in their impact on life chances. Moving beyond controversy and fixed policy positions, the authors propose sophisticated new methods of analysis to underscore the importance of attending to configurations of race, gender, family background, educational achievement, and related conditions when addressing social inequality in America today.

About the Author

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 co-editor of "Configurational Theory and Methods in Organizational Research".

Reviews

"'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

"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

Back to the list of books