Intersectional Inequality: Race, Class, Test Scores, and Poverty

by Charles C. Ragin, Peer C. Fiss

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226414409
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/20/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d)

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 coeditor of Configurational Theory and Methods in Organizational Research.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1 When Inequalities Coincide 6

2 Policy Context: Test Scores and Life Chances 20

3 Explaining Poverty: The Key Causal Conditions 33

4 From Variables to Fuzzy Sets 61

5 Test Scores, Parental Income, and Poverty 80

6 Coinciding Advantages versus Coinciding Disadvantages 101

7 Intersectional Analysis of Causal Conditions Linked to Avoiding Poverty 121

8 Conclusion: The Black-White Cap and the Path Forward for Policy Research 146

Bibliography 163

Index 169

Editorial 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

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.

Harvard University Christopher Winship

"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

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.

University of Durham Barry Cooper