The Logic and Methodology of “Necessary but Not Sufficient Causality”: A Comment on Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA)*

Necessary condition analysis (NCA) has recently been proposed to researchers in business, management, organization, psychology, sociology, and even medicine as a new data analysis tool for identifying necessary but insufficient causes of an outcome. In this comment, I demonstrate that NCA is inadequate for performing such inferences. The reason is a mismatch between the method’s purported search target and its actual output. Moreover, I show that, even if its output corresponded to its search target, the method of qualitative comparative analysis would always outperform NCA in all relevant respects.