qsort R package: A New Tool for Scoring Q-sort Data
David N Sousa, João R. Daniel · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2018
The use of Q-sets to describe subjective views on a specific research domain, in a way suitable for quantitative data analysis, has a long tradition in developmental psychology research.In this field, Q-sets generally consist of a large set of items, usually sentences printed on separate cards, that describe personality and behavioral characteristics.These items are sorted into a different number of numerical categories (e.g., 9) based on their salience as descriptors of an individual (e.g., 1-most uncharacteristic to 9-most characteristic).An individual Q-sort (i.e., the scores of all items descriptive of an individual) can then be compared (correlated) with criteria Q-sorts (description of a hypothetical person at the extreme high end of a domain) to index a score for a particular domain.Also, subsets of items can be averaged to derive a scale score (J. Block, 1961, J. H. Block & Block (1969), J. H. Block & Block (1980), John, Montgomery, & Tate (2014), Vaughn, Santos, & Coppola (2014)).In this paper we present an R package that computes scores from criteria Q-sorts and item scales as traditionally used in developmental psychology research.The qsort package includes descriptions and scoring procedures for four commonly used Q-sets: Attachment Q-set (version 3.0) (Waters, 1995), California Child Q-set (J.H. Block & Block, 1969), Maternal Behaviour Q-set (version 3.1) (Pederson, Moran, & Bento, 1999), and Preschool Q-set (Baumrind, 1968) revised by Wanda Bronson).