card sort task (case 5345)

[Melissa Abo]

Thanks for your help! I will look into it, but it seems like connecting the website and the data to MediaLab might be complicated and/or not possible. I may have to program this study in Qualtrics instead. I've not used it before, but other people in our lab tell me that it can do a card sort task.

[jarvis]

Melissa,

Have you ever used a responses.xls file before? One possible approach would be to use scale response items where the labels would be determined dynamically during the session (e.g., "holidays to spend with friends", "holidays to spend with family"). You could use initial fill in the blank items to capture the participants' "categories". Using the responses.xls file, you could skip them to the sorting task if they enter "done". After that, you could assign those fill-in-the-blank responses as labels for the scale responses. You could also use multiple response items if you wanted subjects to be able to check more than one category. Just a thought.

[Melissa Abo]

I'm sorry; I'm afraid I'm not understanding, perhaps because I"ve not used responses.xls. I see how they could create category names with fill-in-the-blank type questions, but I don't understand how they would then sort the words into those categories using a 'scale' type question?

I think when they are sorting the words into categories, they really need to have all the words and all the categories on the same screen. That way they wouldn't have to remember something like "did I already list 'St Patricks Day' as a cheap or expensive holiday?"

Thanks!

[jason_reed]

If I understand Blair, you will want to create a response file like the example attached to this post. You will also need to create a MediaLab Questionnaire file; I will have to describe it for now because I am away from my computer with MediaLab, but I will post an example later this evening.

Imagine your questionnaire file has 11 items in it: 10 fill in the blank questions and called “fb1” through “fb10” and a multiple response item called “sort.” Each of the fill in the blank questions would be worded like this:

“For the holiday St. Patrick’s Day, please type a phrase that you would use to describe it in the space below. Please continue to type a new phrase in each new space as long as you can think of phrases. When you can’t think of any more phrases to describe St. Partick’s Day, type the word done in all lower-case letters in the space.”

Let’s assume that no participant will list more than 10 phrases, meaning we won’t run out of questions for any participant. Each phrase will be recorded in the row of the attached response.xls file with the corresponding variable name. It also has skip instructions that should move the participant to the next fill in the blank item as long as the participant types anything other than done. If they type done, the participant gets skipped to the “sort” multiple response item in the questionnaire file.

For the “sort” item, click on the Details option. Once there enter <fbx> in each of the “text label” fields of the first 10 rows; replace the x with numbers 1-10. This should show the participant whatever responses he or she entered for the fill in the blank questions.

I hope this helps clarify Blair’s answer.

Cheers.

Psychboiler

[jason_reed]

Here is the example questionnaire file I promised.

Please let me know if this and my previous post makes sense and if this is closer to what you were looking for.

Cheers!

[Melissa Abo]

Hi Psychboiler,

Thank you so much for your efforts to help me. I'm afraid what I'm trying to do is a bit different. Instead of finding the best way to describe something (like St Patrick's Day), we really just want Ps to put holidays into a sort of a pile. For example, holidays would be listed on the left side of the computer screen, and empty boxes would be on the right side of the computer screen. Ps could click and drag holidays from the left into boxes on the right and label the boxes. I'll paste our instructions to Ps below...

Next, you will be asked to sort a list of drugs into groups. First, we would like you to complete an example sorting task. In this example sorting task, you will have a list of 15 different holidays commonly celebrated in America. Your task is to sort these holidays into groups based upon your thoughts and feelings about these holidays. You are to place holidays about which you have similar thoughts and feelings into the same group and holidays about which you have different thoughts and feelings should be sorted into different groups.

Press the space bar to continue

[new screen]

In order to complete this task, you must first decide how many groups you want to have. Remember, you may use as many or as few groups as you desire, but each holiday must be placed in a group.

Father's Day
Veterans Day
Labor Day
Independence Day
New Year's Day
April Fool's Day
Easter
Christmas Day
Columbus Day
Martin Luther King Day
Thanksgiving Day
President's Day
Memorial Day
St. Patrick's Day
Mardi Gras

Press the space bar to continue

[new screen]

For example, given the list of holidays, I came up with the following groups:

• holidays to spend with family: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Father's day;
• holidays to spend with friends: New Years, Memorial day, Labor day, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day, Independence Day;
• quiet holidays: MLK Day, Presidents day, columbus day, veteran's day, st, patricks' day

Ideally, Ps would first decide how many groups they want. Then on the next page, the holidays would be on the left, and the number of boxes on the right would correspond to how many groups they wanted to have. I can do this in Qualtrics using their "rank, group, and order" type question. However, Qualtrics doesn't have RT questions. So, I'd prefer to use MediaLab/DirectRT if it's possible to program this categorization task.

Thanks again for your help,