Three dissimilarity measures for the unconstrained sorting task are investigated. All three are metrics, but differ in the kind of compensation which they make for differences in the sizes of cells within sortings. Empirical tests of the measures are done with sorting data for occupations names and the names of behaviors, using multidimensional…

The common marketing research practice of standardizing the columns of a persons-by-variables data matrix prior to clustering the entities corresponding to the rows was evaluated with 10 large-scale data sets. Results indicate that the column standardization practice may be problematic for some kinds of data that marketing researchers used for…

Correspondence analysis can provide spatial or clustering representations by assigning spatial coordinates minimizing the distance between individuals linked by a sociometric relationship. These scales may then be used to identify individuals' locations in a multidimensional representation of a group's structure or to reorder the rows and columns…

Two versions of a decision rule for determining the most appropriate number of clusters on the basis of a correlation matrix are presented, applied, and compared with three other decision rules. The new rule is efficient for determining the number of clusters on the surface level for multilevel data. (SLD)