Compare methods

	Triad Test	Pile Sorting
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	1988
Originator	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney; Borgatti)	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney; Borgatti)
Type	Elicitation procedure for fine-grained perceived similarity	Elicitation procedure for perceived similarity among domain items
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	Triadic Comparison, Triads Task, Method of Triads, Triad Sorting	Pile Sort Task, Free Pile Sort, Card Sorting (ethnographic), Sorting Task
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.	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.