The Method of Sorting as a Data-Gathering Procedure in Multivariate Research

This study compares two basic variants of the sorting method: single-sort in which each respondent is given only one opportunity to sort the items; and multiple-sort in which the respondent is given several opportunities to sort, each time on a different basis. Kinship terms serve as stimulus materials. Multidimensional scaling solutions show large differences between the two methods with respect to the degree to which the kinship dimensions are used as a basis for sorting. In particular, most respondents ignore the most obvious dimension (sex of the terms) when they believe they have only one opportunity to indicate the dimensions in the set. Similar observations of pairwise judgments in another stimulus domain (consonant phonemes) suggest the same bias may be present in such judgments. Moreover, in both instances hierarchical clustering completely fails to represent the minority of judges who do not ignore the given dimension. These results indicate that a multiple set of judgments from each set of respondents may be superior to a single set of judgments for certain stimulus domains. Finally, the kinship data also indicate that male and female respondents emphasize different kinship dimensions but that aggregated multiple-sort data do appear to reflect the cognitive dimensions present in any given individual.