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	Pile Sorting	Multidimensionell skalning (MDS)
Ämnesområde	Anthropology	Statistik
Familj	Process / pipeline	Latent structure
Ursprungsår	1988	1952–1964
Upphovsperson	Cognitive anthropology tradition (Weller & Romney; Borgatti)	Warren S. Torgerson (metric MDS, 1952); Joseph B. Kruskal (non-metric MDS, 1964)
Typ	Elicitation procedure for perceived similarity among domain items	Dimensionality reduction / visualization
Ursprungskälla	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.
Alias	Pile Sort Task, Free Pile Sort, Card Sorting (ethnographic), Sorting Task	MDS, metric MDS, non-metric MDS, proximity scaling
Närliggande	4	5
Sammanfattning	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.	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.