Statistics, Department of

The R Journal
Date of this Version
12-2014
Document Type
Article
Citation
The R Journal (December 2014) 6(2); Editor: Deepayan Sarkar
Abstract
Q is a methodology to explore the distinct subjective perspectives that exist within a group. It is used increasingly across disciplines. The methodology is semi-qualitative and the data are analysed using data reduction methods to discern the existing patterns of thought. This package is the first to perform Q analysis in R, and it provides many advantages to the existing software: namely, it is fully cross-platform, the algorithms can be transparently examined, it provides results in a clearly structured and tabulated form ready for further exploration and modelling, it produces a graphical summary of the results, and it generates a more concise report of the distinguishing and consensus statements. This paper introduces the methodology and explains how to use the package, its advantages as well as its limitations. I illustrate the main functions with a dataset on value patterns about democracy.
Included in
Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Commons, Programming Languages and Compilers Commons
Comments
Copyright 2014, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported