Structuring educational decisions using the multiple sorting task: An example focusing on international placements in nursing

Abstract

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Conceptualizing Public Space Using a Multiple Sorting Task–Exploring the Links between Loneliness and Public Space

“…Overall, the MST has several key qualities that can make it effective. (1) It is a user-friendly interactive tool for both researchers and participants [93]. It enhances communication with its enjoyable form and ability to provide a learning opportunity for all involved.…”

“…The sorting as an activity can be designed around visual material such as photographs, cards, paper notes, logos, and object elements. It can be conducted with repetitions through multiple sorts which can enhance the data quality [92,93]. The procedure integrates qualitative and quantitative aspects and can be performed verbally, non-verbally or combined.…”

“…The MST was highlighted in recent mental health research for its effectiveness for investigating depression [94,96]. It is also a relatively time-and cost-efficient method [39,93], which could make its wider application in urban design research more easily achieved.…”

“…A multidimentional scalogram analysis (MSA) [38,39,93,96,97] was carried out to see whether there were similarities or differences amongst the places sorted by different individuals. The software HUDAP (1997) [103] was used to compute information from the data matrix produced from the sorting tasks using "MSA-1", though there is other software available for this type of analysis such as the NewMDSX suite [93]. In this non-metric multivariate statistical procedure, each participant's grouping of the photographs is assigned as a "profile" which can be compared to the profiles of all the photographs.…”

“…Each picture is given a coordinate by MSA and can be plotted in a Euclidean space as a point, which makes a two-dimensional representation possible. MSA measures the distance between given objects (points in space) [38,93,97]. The closer the points are to each other, the more similar the photographs are considered to be.…”