By discussing the typological approaches to QCA or CCA by Thomann / Maggetti and Blatter as well as the literature on standards of good practice in QCA, we will argue that two functionally coherent QCA- / CCA-subtypes or -research designs can be distinguished. While one design aims at developing parsimonious empirical mod-els, the other aims at clarifying the empirical scope of theoretically coherent models.
The result of this Paper will be a presentation of validity- and reliability-standards for QCA / CCA in general as well as the presentation of two QCA / CCA-subtypes, their prototypical research questions, aspired explanations and understandings of case-knowledge as well as the steps researchers have to pursue to approximate them in research praxis.