Learning individual's perspectives

The Q-methodology was initially developed by William Stephenson (Stephenson, 1953) in order to inspect peoples' views about a target topic. In this sense, Stephenson highlighted the importance of capturing subjectivity as a strategy to identify groups of individuals sharing the same point view. This is the outcome of the inverted factor analysis, the technique developed by Stephenson to recognise these views. The letter Q only indicates an alternative to the R methodology, which represents the traditional set of quantitative techniques employed in main stream research. In over 80 years, this method has been used in various disciplines well beyond psychology, such as policy making studies, health studies, engineering, political science, education, environmental research, journalim, and so on (Brown, 1997). However, when reading papers on the topic, under the label 'Q-methodology' or 'Q-sort method', alternative practices are applied, making the comprehension of the method a bit obscure (Dziopa & Ahern, 2011).

My aim

As already mentioned, the Q-methodology is not always applied in a rigorous manner (Dziopa & Ahern, 2011), although clear directions and suggestions on how to apply this methodology are currently available (for example,  Brown, 1980, 1996; Herrington & Coogan, 2011; see the links on the left), there are many examples of works and researches that share only some aspects of the original theory. In fact, it would be advisable to distinguish between the Q-methodology and other works that employ the Q-technique without embracing the theoretical framework. In some cases, these applications proved to be very prolific and they constituted a separate line of research (Block, 1961; 1971; Funder, 1988; Asendorpf, 1999; 2009). In line with the variety of possible applications of Q-methodology techniques, my aim is to offer a web application to promote research at all levels, with particular attention to academic research. This is the reason why the Q-sorTouch and the Q-sortware allow the preparation of research designs using the Q-methodology as well as other Q-techniques only loosely associated with it, including the administration of tests with response formats (such as the Likert scale) commonly used in quantitative/qualitative research.