This section has articles on the rigorous collection of qualitative information that are manipulated in ways that help construct a model of the way informants' mental or cultural understandings are organized. This is generally done through collection data about what is salient to people (free listing) and what categories of things people find similar to each other. Often using hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling, a representation emerges of how informants think about one domain of their knowledge. It can also model how much agreement there is between informants regarding the structure of that domain.
An allied method, concept mapping, is useful when researchers themselves are groping for the categories they think will be useful in qualitative analysis. This method helps a group of researchers decide upon these categories in a rigorous way
References:
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