论文信息 - MDSORT: A special-purpose multidimensional scaling program for sorting data

MDSORT: A special-purpose multidimensional scaling program for sorting data

MDSORT (Takane, 1980) is a multidimensionalscaling (MDS) program specifically designed for sortingdata. In the stimulus sorting method, the subjects areasked to sort a set of stimuli into as many groups(clusters) as they wish so that the stimuli in a clusterare more similar to each other than those in differentclusters. This method has enjoyed great popularityamong social scientists as a quick and easy data collection method for similarities. The sorting task is easy toperform, so the method is particularly suitable when onehas naive subjects and/or a large number of stimuli(up to 100) and when it is difficult to obtain direct(dis)similarity judgments for every possible pair ofstimuli. Typically, the sorting data are analyzed bynonmetric MDSusing such procedures as KYST (Kruskal

Yoshio Takane

[1] Y. Takane. Analysis of Categorizing Behavior by a Quantification Method , 1980 .

[2] Forrest W. Young,et al. Nonmetric individual differences multidimensional scaling: An alternating least squares method with optimal scaling features , 1977 .