Configurational Insight is the consulting practice of Claude Rubinson, Ph.D., whose work focuses on configurational-comparative methods (CCMs) and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). I collaborate with researchers and research teams using CCMs in the social sciences, health and medicine, policy analysis and program evaluation, including teams based in government agencies and NGOs. Configurational Insight supports these projects by providing specialized methodological guidance in the design, analysis and reporting of configurational-comparative research.

About Claude Rubinson

Claude Rubinson is a sociologist specializing in CCMs and QCA. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Houston–Downtown and received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2010 under the direction of Charles Ragin. From 2014–2025, Professor Rubinson served on the management team of COMPASSS, the international consortium of CCM methodologists and practitioners. In 2021, he co-founded the QCA Conference of the Americas, an annual meeting that brings together academic and applied researchers working with configurational approaches.

Professor Rubinson's scholarship extends configurational-comparative techniques to novel domains and research questions in order to clarify the conceptual and analytical foundations of the methodology itself. Through Configurational Insight, he brings this expertise and judgment to research questions for which configurational-comparative methods offer particular value, ensuring that analyses are methodologically rigorous and aligned with the theoretical and empirical problems they address.

Collaborations

I work with researchers and research teams using CCMs, as well as those considering whether a configurational approach is appropriate for their research. From research design through data analysis and interpretation, I provide methodological guidance that ensures research projects are theoretically grounded, methodologically sound, and appropriate to the empirical and conceptual problems under investigation.

Many of these collaborations center on the types of methodological concerns that arise when working with QCA and related methods, including: case selection, measurement and calibration, necessity testing, the construction and minimization of truth tables, and the derivation and interpretation of QCA solutions.

Researchers often bring me into a project early in its development to discuss whether configurational-comparative analysis is appropriate and, if so, how to design a study that will work well. Other times, I join projects already underway. In these situations, my task is to work with the available data and within the existing research design, clarifying what kinds of configurational claims the evidence can reasonably support.

Either way, the aim of the collaboration is the same: applying configurational-comparative methods in ways that maintain their integrity so as to support clear, defensible conclusions, while allowing their sensitivity to context and causal complexity to illuminate the combinations of conditions associated with the outcomes under study.

Contact

For inquiries about methodological consulting, please contact: rubinson@configurationalinsight.com