[Sigia-l] obfuscating structure in card sorts?

[Matthew deStwolinski]

> It doesn't take much imagination to rewrite these cards using synonyms
> and different phrase structures...

Perhaps this is a sign that your fears are correct and that you've
inflicted your bias on me, but it seems like you're trying to take sets
of things that are very similar and manufacture differences that aren't
there.

I agree that you should try to keep your own mental structure of the
information from biasing the subjects.  But by varying the descriptions
as you've suggested, you run the risk of making this less about
organizing items than about being able to correlate various
terms/phrases together.  Are you more interested in finding out if users
would lump all the cost/benefits analyses together separately from a
lump of case studies?  Or are you more interested in finding out whether
subjects know that cost-benefit analysis and ROI are related?

Instead, try to find ways in which the various items actually are
different.  If your six cost-benefit analyses, for instance, follow the
same scope, perspective, structure, methodology, etc. to the point that
the only differences among them are the method and the results, then
perhaps you should use the same language to describe them.  If instead
they vary in those or other significant ways, it would seem beneficial
to try to capture some of these differences in the descriptions.  Then
you can see how important or unimportant these differences are to your
subjects.

Matthew