[Sigia-l] Straw poll re: card sorting

[Donna Timara]

On 8/18/05, Billie Mandel <Billie.Mandel at openwave.com> wrote:
> ... Our esteemed
> colleagues Lou R and Peter Mo suggest that card sorts are better for
> qualitative than quantitative analysis, but I know plenty of people
> swear by their cluster analysis software.  What say ye?

I am waiting to hear, if any one has ever attempted it. Cluster
analysis is surely a statistical method, i.e. will get you
qualtitative stuffs to compare. Here's one link that I thought may be
useful --

http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stcluan.html

"The term cluster analysis (first used by Tryon, 1939) encompasses a
number of different algorithms and methods for grouping objects of
similar kind into respective categories. A general question facing
researchers in many areas of inquiry is how to organize observed data
into meaningful structures, that is, to develop taxonomies. In other
words cluster analysis is an exploratory data analysis tool which aims
at sorting different objects into groups in a way that the degree of
association between two objects is maximal if they belong to the same
group and minimal otherwise. Given the above, cluster analysis can be
used to discover structures in data without providing an
explanation/interpretation. In other words, cluster analysis simply
discovers structures in data without explaining why they exist."

> I'm also curious as to how many users you have put through the exercise,

My guesstatimate is "30" for resonably perfect, unbiased distribution,
however, more is always better in stats :-)