Fuzzy Sets and Social Research

An introduction to a special issue on fuzzy sets presents the four in-depth methodological discussions are an attempt to validate this new methodology which extends Boolean or "crisp" sets by allowing membership scores in the interval between 0 & 1. The inclusion of such dichotomies as public vs private or employed vs unemployed helps social scientists to conceptualize social & political occurrences as sets with imprecise boundaries between membership & non-membership. By comparing fuzzy sets to more established approaches, contributors demonstrate the strength of this methodology, especially its ability to permit a more nuanced representation of categorical concepts, address diversity & ambiguity in a systematic way, evaluate set-theoretic relationships, & faithfully translate set-theoretic terms. The four contributions illustrate this methodology's usefulness for both qualitative & quantitative research by highlighting the capacity of fuzzy sets to assign partial membership to cases of sets & to find causal patterns not addressed by established approaches. The limitations of fuzzy sets are examined & a synopsis of each article is included. 9 References. J. Lindroth