| Abstract: | Arguments favoring free- over forced-distribution Q sorts have assumed that forcing leads to loss of important statistical information and interferes with interval properties, rendering Pearson's r inappropriate for analysis. Q sorts with identical item orderings but with varied distributions are shown to provide essentially the same correlations and factor structures when coefficients are computed using Spearman's rs, Kendall's τ, and Pearson's r, leading to the conclusion that the same results are obtained, despite distribution and whether interval or ordinal statistics are used. |
