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	Cultural Consensus Model	Pile Sorting
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 (Weller & Romney; Borgatti)
Type	Latent-structure measurement model for shared cultural knowledge	Elicitation procedure for perceived similarity among domain items
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	Pile Sort Task, Free Pile Sort, Card Sorting (ethnographic), Sorting Task
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.	Pile sorting is an elicitation technique in which informants are handed a set of cards — one per item in a cultural domain — and asked to group them into piles of items that 'go together.' By recording which items each person places in the same pile and aggregating across many informants, the researcher builds a similarity matrix that reveals how the culture organizes the domain, which is then visualized with multidimensional scaling and clustering.