Organization and visualization for initial analysis of forced-choice ipsative data

Abstract

Forced-choice ipsative data are common in personality, philosophy and other preference-based studies. However, this type of data inherently contains dependencies that are challenging for usual statistical analysis. In order to utilize the structure of the data as a guide for analysis rather than as a challenge to manage, a visualisation tool was developed to emphasize the established framework and enhance analysis tools. This visualisation has many strength, including the display of significant amounts of data at once in three dimensions with little loss of detail, incorporating the theoretical framework for the data into the structure of the visualisation and organizing the data for use with common statistical tests and analysis tools.

Keywords:

• visualization
• ipsative
• philosophy
• secondary
• mathematics