Paired Comparison Method
The paired comparison method is a systematic elicitation technique in which informants are shown every possible pair of items from a set and asked, for each pair, which member better fits a single criterion — which is sweeter, more dangerous, more prestigious, or more similar to a reference. Because every item is judged against every other item, the procedure forces fine, transitive discriminations that a one-shot ranking would blur. Aggregating the pairwise verdicts across informants yields a dominance or proximity matrix from which a stable rank order or an interval scale can be recovered.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Weller, S. C., & Romney, A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Qualitative Research Methods Series 10. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. · ISBN 9780803930742
- Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. · ISBN 9780759112421
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.