Method evidence record

Pile Sorting

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.

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Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.

Pile-Sort Elicitation of Perceived Similarity

Taxonomic method record · process-pipeline / anthropology

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. · URL

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Related methods

Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.

Same method familyCultural Domain Analysismachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Taxonomic bucketFree Listingmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.See alsoMultidimensional Scalingmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Taxonomic bucketTriad Testmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.