Compare methods

	Pile Sorting	Cultural Domain Analysis
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	1994
Originator	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney; Borgatti)	Stephen P. Borgatti (synthesis of cognitive anthropology methods)
Type	Elicitation procedure for perceived similarity among domain items	Integrated framework for eliciting and analyzing cultural domains
Seminal source	Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742	Borgatti, S. P. (1994). Cultural domain analysis. Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 4(4), 261–278.
Aliases	Pile Sort Task, Free Pile Sort, Card Sorting (ethnographic), Sorting Task	CDA, Domain Analysis (cognitive anthropology), Cultural Domains Approach, Cognitive Domain Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Cultural domain analysis is the integrated framework in cognitive anthropology for discovering the content and structure of a cultural domain — a coherent set of related items such as illnesses, animals, kin terms, or emotions — as the members of a culture themselves organize it. It chains together elicitation methods (free listing, pile sorting, triad tests) and analytic methods (salience, multidimensional scaling, clustering, consensus analysis) to move from 'what items are in this domain?' to 'how are they organized and how widely is that organization shared?'