card sort task (case 5345)

[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,