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Structuring involved two distinct tasks, the sorting and rating
of the brainstormed statements. For the sorting (Rosenberg and
Kim, 1975; Weller and Romney, 1988), each participant was given
a listing of the statements laid out in mailing label format with
twelve to a page and asked to cut the listing into slips with
one statement (and its identifying number) on each slip. They
were instructed to group the ninety-six statement slips into piles
"in a way that makes sense to you." The only restrictions
in this sorting task were that there could not be: (a) N piles
(in this case 96 piles of one item each); (b) one pile consisting
of all 96 items; or (c) a "miscellaneous" pile (any
item thought to be unique was to be put in its own separate pile).
Weller and Romney (1988) point out why unstructured sorting (in
their terms, the pile sort method) is appropriate in this context:
The outstanding strength of the pile sort task is the fact that
it can accommodate a large number of items. We know of no other
data collection method that will allow the collection of judged
similarity data among over 100 items. This makes it the method
of choice when large numbers are necessary. Other methods that
might be used to collect similarity data, such as triads and paired
comparison ratings, become impractical with a large number of
items (p. 25).
After sorting the statements, each participant recorded the contents
of each pile by listing a short pile label and the statement identifying
numbers on a sheet that was provided. For the rating task, the
brainstormed statements were listed in questionnaire form and
each participant was asked to rate each statement on a 5-point
Likert-type response scale in terms of the relative importance
of each competency as stated above. Because participants were
unlikely to brainstorm statements that were totally unimportant
with respect to PSR, it was stressed that the rating should be
considered a relative judgment of the importance of each
item to all the other items brainstormed.
This concluded the structuring session.
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