Compare methods

	Paired Comparison Method	Free Listing
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	1988
Originator	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney)	Cognitive anthropology tradition (formalized by Weller & Romney; Borgatti)
Type	Elicitation procedure for scaling or ranking items by a single criterion	Elicitation procedure for the items and salience of a cultural domain
Seminal source	Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742	Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742
Aliases	Method of Paired Comparisons, Pairwise Comparison Task, Pair-Comparison Ranking, Pairwise Judgment Elicitation	Free Lists, Free-List Task, Free Recall Listing, Freelisting
Related	4	4
Summary	The paired comparison method is a systematic elicitation technique in which informants are shown every possible pair of items from a set and asked, for each pair, which member better fits a single criterion — which is sweeter, more dangerous, more prestigious, or more similar to a reference. Because every item is judged against every other item, the procedure forces fine, transitive discriminations that a one-shot ranking would blur. Aggregating the pairwise verdicts across informants yields a dominance or proximity matrix from which a stable rank order or an interval scale can be recovered.	Free listing is a foundational elicitation technique in cognitive anthropology in which informants are asked to name, in any order, all the items they can think of that belong to a cultural domain — for example 'all the kinds of fruit' or 'all the things that can give you a cold.' Aggregating these lists reveals both the content of the domain (which items belong) and the salience of each item (how culturally central it is), inferred from how frequently and how early it is mentioned.