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	Triad Test	Multidimensional Scaling
Field	Anthropology	Statistics
Family	Process / pipeline	Latent structure
Year of origin	1988	1952–1964
Originator	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney; Borgatti)	Warren S. Torgerson (metric MDS, 1952); Joseph B. Kruskal (non-metric MDS, 1964)
Type	Elicitation procedure for fine-grained perceived similarity	Dimensionality reduction / visualization
Seminal source	Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780803930742	Kruskal, J. B. (1964). Multidimensional scaling by optimizing goodness of fit to a nonmetric hypothesis. Psychometrika, 29(1), 1–27.
Aliases	Triadic Comparison, Triads Task, Method of Triads, Triad Sorting	MDS, metric MDS, non-metric MDS, proximity scaling
Related	4	5
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.	Multidimensional scaling maps objects described only by pairwise similarities or dissimilarities into a low-dimensional geometric space so that distances in that space reflect the original proximity structure as faithfully as possible. It is widely used to visualize the hidden structure of psychological, social, and behavioral data.