Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 1,360

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 71 of the 71 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA): Logic and Methodology of “Necessary but Not Sufficient” Causality

Open access
Dul, Jan·2016·Organizational Research Methods

Abstract

Theoretical “necessary but not sufficient” statements are common in the organizational sciences. Traditional data analyses approaches (e.g., correlation or multiple regression) are not appropriate for testing or inducing such statements. This article proposes necessary condition analysis (NCA) as a general and straightforward methodology for identifying necessary conditions in data sets. The article presents the logic and methodology of necessary but not sufficient contributions of organizational determinants (e.g., events, characteristics, resources, efforts) to a desired outcome (e.g., good performance). A necessary determinant must be present for achieving an outcome, but its presence is not sufficient to obtain that outcome. Without the necessary condition, there is guaranteed failure, which cannot be compensated by other determinants of the outcome. This logic and its related methodology are fundamentally different from the traditional sufficiency-based logic and methodology. Practical recommendations and free software are offered to support researchers to apply NCA.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1177/1094428115584005

Cites

71 of 71 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 71 references

Research works printed but not linked: 24

  1. Abbott B., 1974, Berkeley studies in syntax and semantics, 1
  2. Aigner D. J., 1968, American Economic Review, 58, 826
  3. 10.5465/amj.2010.0328 · doi:10.5465/amj.2010.0328 · Paper page
  4. 10.2307/254742 · doi:10.2307/254742
  5. 10.1177/1094428109355485 · doi:10.1177/1094428109355485
  6. Dettmer H. W., 1998, Breaking the constraints to world-class performance
  7. Dul J., 2015, Paper presented at the 5th GIKA Conference
  8. Dul J. (2015c). Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) for R: A quick start guide. Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=2624981 or http://repub.eur.nl/pub/78323/ · doi:10.32614/cran.package.nca
  9. Gans J., 2003, Assessing australia’s innovative capacity in the 21st century
  10. Harvey F. P., 2003, Necessary conditions: Theory, methodology, and applications, 147
  11. 10.1111/j.1365-3016.2003.00534.x · doi:10.1111/j.1365-3016.2003.00534.x
  12. Hogan R., 2007, Hogan Personality Inventory manual
  13. 10.1590/S0100-512X2011000200007 · doi:10.1590/s0100-512x2011000200007
  14. Most B. A., 2003, Necessary conditions: Theory, methodology, and applications, 25
  15. Pizzi C., 1993, O que nos faz pensar, 7, 89
  16. Ragin C. C., 2003, Necessary conditions: Theory, methodology, and applications, 179
  17. Rowe A., 1944, Elimination diets and the patient’s allergies
  18. Schüz E., 1940, Ornithologische Monatsberichte, 48, 104
  19. 10.3109/00313028709077120 · doi:10.3109/00313028709077120
  20. Van der Valk W., 2015, When contracts and trust are both necessary for innovation in buyer-supplier relationships
  21. Van Maanen H., 2010, Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde, 5, 134
  22. 10.1002/(SICI)1096-9896(199909)189:1<12::AID-PATH431>3.0.CO;2-F · doi:10.1002/(sici)1096-9896(199909)189:1<12::aid-path431>3.0.co;2-f
  23. 10.1037/0278-7393.16.3.509 · doi:10.1037/0278-7393.16.3.509
  24. Westerhuis G., Dul J., De Jong A., Hak T. (2012). Success in bank mergers. An application of Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) in business history [Abstract]. Retrived from http://couperin.sciencesconf.org/conference/ebha-bhsj-paris/boa_en.pd.

Cited by

See all 1,360

Metadata

Authors
Dul, J.
Venue
Organizational Research Methods
Published
2015-07-15
Volume
19
Issue
1
Pages
10-52
ISSN
  • 1094-4281 (ISSN-L)
  • 1552-7425
OpenAlex
W2158296862
Cited by
1,360
References
71
FWCI
57.58
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA): Logic and Methodology of “Necessary but Not Sufficient” Causality. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/1094428115584005
The paper
Dul, J. (2016). Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA): Logic and Methodology of “Necessary but Not Sufficient” Causality. Organizational Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428115584005

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.