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| Smith's Salience Index (S)× | Pile Sorting× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Anthropology | Anthropology |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 1993 | 1988 |
| Originator≠ | J. Jerome Smith; popularized through ANTHROPAC (Borgatti) and AnthroTools | Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney; Borgatti) |
| Type≠ | Salience statistic combining mention frequency and recall order in free-list data | Elicitation procedure for perceived similarity among domain items |
| Seminal source≠ | Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421 | Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742 |
| Aliases | Smith's S, Salience Index S, Free-List Salience, Item Salience Score | Pile Sort Task, Free Pile Sort, Card Sorting (ethnographic), Sorting Task |
| Related | 4 | 4 |
| Summary≠ | Smith's salience index, conventionally written S, is the standard statistic for summarizing free-list data: for each item it combines how many informants mentioned the item with how early the item appeared in their lists. Within a single list each item receives a local salience equal to the number of items below it divided by the list length, so the first item scores highest and the last scores lowest; S is then the average of that local salience across the entire sample, counting zero for informants who never listed the item. The result is a single per-item number that ranks the items of a cultural domain by their joint frequency-and-priority prominence. | 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. |
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