Summary
Contents
Subject index
Quantitative Psychology is arguably one of the oldest disciplines within the field of psychology and nearly all psychologists are exposed to quantitative psychology in some form. While textbooks in statistics, research methods, and psychological measurement exist none offer a unified treatment of quantitative psychology. The SAGE Handbook of Quantitative Methods in Psychology does just that. Each chapter covers a methodological topic with equal attention paid to established theory and the challenges facing methodologists as they address new research questions using that particular methodology. The reader will come away from each chapter with a greater understanding of the methodology being addressed as well as an understanding of the directions for future developments within that methodological area.
Multidimensional Scaling
Multidimensional Scaling
Introduction
The notion of similarity plays a fundamental role in psychology, especially in cognitive psychology. According to Tversky (1977), similarity is an organizing principle by which we categorize, generalize, and classify objects. These activities are crucial for the survival of species. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a collection of data analysis techniques for analysis of proximity data. The word ‘proximity’ here refers to the degree of similarity or dissimilarity among stimuli (objects) of interest. (We use the word ‘proximity’ as a superordinate term that includes both similarity and dissimilarity.) More specifically, MDS is a class of data analysis techniques that represents a set of stimuli as points in a multidimensional space in such a way that the distances between them best represent the observed ...
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