Compare methods

	Ethnoscience Taxonomy	Successive Pile Sorting
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	1988
Originator	Ethnoscience / new ethnography tradition (Spradley; Conklin; Frake)	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney)
Type	Elicitation and analysis procedure for native folk classification systems	Elicitation procedure for hierarchical structure of a cultural domain
Seminal source	Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN: 9780030444968	Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742
Aliases	Folk Taxonomy, Ethnographic Semantics, New Ethnography Taxonomy, Folk Classification Analysis	Hierarchical Pile Sort, Successive Sorting Task, Multi-Level Pile Sort, Successive Free Pile Sort
Related	4	4
Summary	Ethnoscience taxonomy is the ethnoscientific, or 'new ethnography,' approach to recovering how a culture classifies its world by eliciting the native terms of a domain and the inclusion and contrast relations that link them. Through structured interview questions — especially 'Is X a kind of Y?' and 'What kinds of Y are there?' — the researcher discovers which categories nest under which and which categories stand opposed at the same level. Organizing these relations produces a folk-taxonomic tree: a hierarchy of native categories built from the informants' own words rather than from scientific classification imposed from outside.	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.