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Applying Q-Methodology to Investigate People’ Preferences for Multivariate Stimuli

Gao, J; Soranzo, A; (2020) Applying Q-Methodology to Investigate People’ Preferences for Multivariate Stimuli. Frontiers in Psychology , 11 , Article 556509. 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.556509. Green open access

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Abstract

This article serves as a step-by-step guide of a new application of Q-methodology to investigate people’s preferences for multivariate stimuli. Q-methodology has been widely applied in fields such as sociology, education and political sciences but, despite its numerous advantages, it has not yet gained much attention from experimental psychologists. This may be due to the fact that psychologists examining preferences, often adopt stimuli resulting from a combination of characteristics from multiple variables, and in repeated measure designs. At present, Q methodology has not been adapted to accommodate. We therefore developed a novel analysis procedure allowing Q-methodology to handle these conditions. We propose a protocol requiring five analyses of a decision process to estimate: (1) the preference of stimuli, (2) the dominance of variables, (3) the individual differences, (4) the interaction between individual differences and preference, and (5) the interaction between individual differences and dominance. The guide comes with a script developed in R (R Core Team, 2020) to run the five analyses; furthermore, we provide a case study with a detailed description of the procedure and corresponding results. This guide is particularly beneficial to conduct and analyze experiments in any research on people’s preferences, such as experimental aesthetics, prototype testing, visual perception (e.g., judgments of similarity/dissimilarity to a model), etc.

Type: Article
Title: Applying Q-Methodology to Investigate People’ Preferences for Multivariate Stimuli
Location: Switzerland
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.556509
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.556509
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2020 Gao and Soranzo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Keywords: individual differences, dominance – rank orders, preference, repeated measures analyses, Q-methodology
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10117152
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