Compare methods

	Successive Pile Sorting	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 hierarchical structure of a cultural domain	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	Hierarchical Pile Sort, Successive Sorting Task, Multi-Level Pile Sort, Successive Free Pile Sort	Free Lists, Free-List Task, Free Recall Listing, Freelisting
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	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.