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

Comments

Copyright 2014, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported

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.

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