Preparing Card Sort Data for Multidimensional Scaling Analysis in Social Psychological Research: A Methodological Approach

Card sorting is a popular data-gathering technique. Although multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a statistical analogue of the technique, researchers rarely apply it to this type of data. The authors' contention is that a barrier to applying MDS to card sorting data is the lack of guidance in the literature about how to organize and prepare the data for analysis. The authors describe a method that gives guidance to researchers in the field of social psychology who want to analyze card sort data using MDS, which can be used to confirm or validate hypotheses about specific social psychological structures hidden in data.