Compare methods

	Residue Analysis (Kinship Terminology)	Successive Pile Sorting
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	1988
Originator	Cognitive anthropology and formal semantics tradition (codified by Bernard; Weller & Romney)	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney)
Type	Formal-semantic technique for defining kin categories by distinctive features	Elicitation procedure for hierarchical structure of a cultural domain
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	Componential Residue Analysis, Feature Residue Method, Distinctive-Feature Analysis of Kin Terms, Kin-Term Componential Analysis	Hierarchical Pile Sort, Successive Sorting Task, Multi-Level Pile Sort, Successive Free Pile Sort
Related	4	4
Summary	Residue analysis is a componential, formal-semantic technique for defining the categories named by kinship terms. Each kin term is treated as a bundle of distinctive features — such as sex of relative, generation, and lineality — and the analyst seeks the minimal set of features that exactly picks out the genealogical positions the term covers. The cases a candidate definition fails to account for form the residue, and competing feature definitions are tested by which leaves the smallest, most principled residual. The method makes the implicit logic of a kin-term system explicit and falsifiable.	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.