Summary

Here is full documentation about how Q-Assessor works.

These pages begin with a brief overview of how Q-Methodology works and then walk through the steps involved in using Q-Assessor to create, run, and use a Q study.

Please review each topic for details about Q-Assessor’s features and components. The descriptions are illustrated with helpful screen-shots that show Q-Assessor in action. Click on the thumbnail views in the text to see larger versions with additional descriptive information.

Once you’ve read about how Q-Assessor works, you can try it out yourself. Any registered and logged-in user can create and run her own Q-Assessor Study for free. Check it out and see us in action!

About Q-Assessor

Overview of Q Methodology

Q methodology is a well-established, scientifically based approach to study opinions, attitudes, discourses and beliefs. Operationally, Q technique presents participants with a series of statements, opinions, or other stimuli, which they rank on a positive-to-negative scale. Sophisticated factor analysis of the correlated rankings from all participants then reveals and quantifies underlying viewpoints held by the subjects. This section describes more about Q methodology’s concepts, how the Q technique works, and how Q Methodology is currently used.

Overview of Q-Assessor

Q-Assessor provides many features and capabilities, yet it is actually quite straightforward to use. This section outlines the ten simple steps involved in using Q-Assessor.

Q-Assessor Demos

The best way to get a direct sense of how Q-Assessor works is to try out it out yourself. Here are several ways that you can do just that.

Q-Assessor Studies

A Study is the fundamental organizing unit within the Q-Assessor system. It encompasses and manages all the components of a Q Methodology project — the statement samples, the “bins” into which they are sorted, data management, and all the participant-related features (enrollment, reminders, etc). This section provides an outline of how these pieces go together as well as details about how to create and manage the study itself.

Managing Statement Concourses

Statements are the basic phenomena Q Methodology studies investigate. These are usually texts (opinions, terms, views, or sentences), but they can also be non-verbal elements (audio clips or images). These are the elements that Q study participants evaluate and sort. Q-Assessor provides easy-to-use tools to manage all aspects of handling statement concourses. This section provides detailed descriptions about how to create and edit statements, manage user- and group-scoped libraries, and use them in studies.

Managing Sort Bins

Sort Bins in Q-Assessor define the ranked groupings into which participants sort Statements. Each Bin can contain a certain number of Statements, has a certain numerical value used to calculate the Study factors, and has a descriptive label that informs the participant what the Bin means. This section provides a detailed explanation of how to add and adjust Sort Bins to a Study in Q-Assessor.

Managing Interview Questions

Each Q-Assessor Study can present participants with one or more additional questions that function as “exit interviews” commonly used by Q investigators. Q-Assessor provides easy-to-use tools to create these questions and maintain them in user- and group-scoped libraries. This section is a description of these tools and how you use them to augment your study’s findings.

Managing Participant Enrollment

Q-Assessor provides powerful tools to make recruiting and interacting with participants easy. Q-Assessor handles email invitations, reminders, and thank-you messages and archives all emails sent for easy review. This section provides detailed descriptions of all these features.

Q-Assessor Sessions

Once you’ve configured and released a Q-Assessor Study, participants perform the online Q-sorts and reply to any ancillary questions. This section describes and illustrates how this all works.

Managing Data

Q-Assessor stores all of a Study’s collected data in its industrial-grade database. As the data arrive, they are easily browsed so investigators can monitor the progress of their study. They can also download their raw data to their own computes at any time. This section describes in detail how Q-Assessor handles these data management features.

Real-time, Interactive Data Analysis

Processing Q-sort data into interpretable factors has always been a major rate-limiting step for Q-Methodology. Standard statistical packages do not handle Q’s peculiarities well, and the primary Q-specific tool now in use (PQMethod) is a quirky command-line tool written in FORTRAN back in the early 1990s.

Q-Assessor has reimplemented in a modern language (Ruby) the algorithms of PQMethod to produce identical numeric results. More importantly, Q-Assessor has integrated these numeric processes into a web-based user interface that produces results much faster and more clearly — particularly the interactive “rotation” steps. This section explains how we do this.

Q-Assessor Subscriptions

Q-Assessor is still in a beta-test development phase, and as we’re refining our basic technologies, we’re also refining our business model. One thing is clear, though: we will offer subscription plans for both individuals and groups. This section outlines how we’re thinking this will work.

Future Directions for Q-Assessor

We have several ideas for further enhancements for Q-Assessor. We describe them here and solicit your input as to how important these ideas may be.

Terms of Use

Here is the fine-print about using the Q-Assessor site.

FAQ: Signing Up, Logging In, and Subscribing To Q-Assessor

Here are answers to frequently-asked questions about procedural details: signing-up, logging-in, managing passwords and email addresses, etc.

While Q-Assessor is still in beta release, subscriptions will remain fairly loosely-defined and generously-granted phenomena. At some point once Q-Assessor has proven its worth and Q-Assessor becomes a truly subscription-based service, we’ll provide details about how to manage your account here as well.