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Cultural Salience Analysis×Successive Pile Sorting×
FieldAnthropologyAnthropology
FamilyProcess / pipelineProcess / pipeline
Year of origin19971988
OriginatorSmith & Borgatti; cognitive anthropology traditionCognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney)
TypeAnalysis procedure for quantifying item importance in free-list dataElicitation procedure for hierarchical structure of a cultural domain
Seminal sourceBernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742
AliasesSalience Analysis, Smith's Salience Index, Free-List Salience Analysis, Item Salience ScoringHierarchical Pile Sort, Successive Sorting Task, Multi-Level Pile Sort, Successive Free Pile Sort
Related44
SummaryCultural salience analysis is the analytical step that turns raw free-list data into a ranked measure of how culturally central each item is, by combining two signals that free lists capture for free: how often an item is mentioned and how early it appears in informants' lists. The standard estimator is Smith's salience index S, which credits each item for being both common across people and prominent in recall, then averages that credit over the whole sample. Breaking salience out by code or subgroup further reveals how the importance of items shifts across genders, ages, expertise levels, or cultural groups.Successive pile sorting is an extension of the single-level pile sort in which informants first divide a set of items into a few broad piles and then repeatedly subdivide each pile into finer groupings (or, in the lumping variant, repeatedly merge piles into coarser ones). Recording the level at which any two items first become separated yields a graded similarity measure that captures the hierarchical structure of a cultural domain, not just a single flat partition.
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ScholarGateCompare methods: Cultural Salience Analysis · Successive Pile Sorting. Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/compare