Compare methods

	Paired Comparison Method	Triad Test
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	1988
Originator	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney)	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney; Borgatti)
Type	Elicitation procedure for scaling or ranking items by a single criterion	Elicitation procedure for fine-grained perceived similarity
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	Triadic Comparison, Triads Task, Method of Triads, Triad Sorting
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.	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.