Generalized Q analysis as a new tool in social science research - a pedagogical introduction

Q analysis is a frequently used, multivariate exploratory technique in the social sciences which seeks to identify and analyse commonalities and differences in the respondents' rankings of a set of relevant individual qualitative statements. It has some intrinsic weaknesses which may be overcome by widening and deepening the underlying multivariate statistical approach. This new technique, termed a Generalized Q method, is able to handle an enlargement of the number of ranked combined statements based on a structured re-combination of the rankings of simple statements. This method will be presented in this paper. We employ a simple illustrative data set in our study. In comparing the traditional and the Generalized Q analysis, the same questionnaire data are used to apply and assess both methods, to compare the results, and to highlight the advantages of the Generalized Q method. We find that the latter technique is able to take account of many simple questionnaires with trustful responses, allows for an expansion of the number of respondents, facilitates the naming and interpretation of the extracted multivariate components, and is able to test the consistency of the responses.