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	Cultural Consensus Model	Triad Test
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 fine-grained perceived similarity
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	Triadic Comparison, Triads Task, Method of Triads, Triad Sorting
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.	The triad test is an elicitation technique for measuring perceived similarity among the items of a cultural domain. Informants are shown items three at a time and asked to pick the one that is most different (or, equivalently, which two are most alike). Across many triads and many informants, the pattern of which items are repeatedly kept together yields a fine-grained similarity matrix that is analyzed with multidimensional scaling and clustering.