Compare methods

	Triad Test	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 fine-grained perceived similarity	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	Triadic Comparison, Triads Task, Method of Triads, Triad Sorting	CDA, Domain Analysis (cognitive anthropology), Cultural Domains Approach, Cognitive Domain Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	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?'