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	Cultural Consensus Model	Free Listing
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Latent structure	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	1988
Originator	A. Kimball Romney, Susan C. Weller & William H. Batchelder	Cognitive anthropology tradition (formalized by Weller & Romney; Borgatti)
Type	Latent-structure measurement model for shared cultural knowledge	Elicitation procedure for the items and salience of a cultural domain
Seminal source	Romney, A. K., Weller, S. C., & Batchelder, W. H. (1986). Culture as consensus: A theory of culture and informant accuracy. American Anthropologist, 88(2), 313–338.	Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742
Aliases	Cultural Consensus Theory, CCT, Consensus Analysis, Informant Accuracy Model	Free Lists, Free-List Task, Free Recall Listing, Freelisting
Related	4	4
Summary	The cultural consensus model is a latent-structure measurement framework that estimates the culturally shared answers to a set of questions and, simultaneously, how much each informant knows, without the researcher knowing the correct answers in advance. Introduced by Romney, Weller and Batchelder in 1986, it treats agreement among informants as evidence of shared knowledge and uses a factor-analytic (or, in modern variants, Bayesian) decomposition to recover both a single 'answer key' and an informant-specific competence score.	Free listing is a foundational elicitation technique in cognitive anthropology in which informants are asked to name, in any order, all the items they can think of that belong to a cultural domain — for example 'all the kinds of fruit' or 'all the things that can give you a cold.' Aggregating these lists reveals both the content of the domain (which items belong) and the salience of each item (how culturally central it is), inferred from how frequently and how early it is mentioned.