I believe you are looking for platform where you can use ranking of statements.

Both eSurvey Creator and Webropol provides ranking questions facility. I think both are free platforms for limited number of responses and during.

Hi,

I prefer this platform -  http://q-assessor.com/entries/3003. It includes creation of Q-set, Q-sorting and also the possibility of data analysis. 

I agree with Denisa, q-assessor it's one of the more complete (and free) platform. 

Q-Assessor actually costs $500 (US) / month.

hi

Anusuya, did you ever find a free or low-cost option for your Q-sort? Thanks!

Sure. We can do a Q-method study without relying on any platforms. I believe most of the postgraduates and researchers could be equipped with SPSS on their computers, then the Q-method study could be 100% free.

Data collection (online, via Quatrics): You can use Quatrics to design the Q-sort and collect data. Make sure the "question type" is "pick, group and rank", then you will know how to do it. See the youtube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEqPJoKxo2w

Data collection (manually): Recruit participants and ask them to do Q-sorting face-to-face with you. It's troublesome but 100% free.

Data analysis (free online platform): After collecting the data, you can go to a website named Ken-Q Analysis for data analysis. Link: https://shawnbanasick.github.io/ken-q-analysis/

Data analysis (SPSS, manually): You can also analyse the data with the use of SPSS. Basically it's an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), so we can quickly get the results. Path: Analysis- Dimension Reduction- Factor. Choose the methods in "Extraction", "Rotation" and "Options". Search Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and you will see how to do it. If you hope to know more details, contact me, I can help.

Hope you find these helpful.

Hi Anusuya,

did you check out:

https://qmethodsoftware.com/

or

http://www.qsortware.net/

Both appear to be free of charge. I was planning to conduct Q interviews in person, but due to the current situation, I'm forced to switch to an online platform. I'm currently testing the first option. Let's see how it goes.

Cheers,

Chris

Update:

the first option only allows 10 statements in the free version

Hi Zhanni, thanks for these! I've seen that YouTube video for Qualtrics, but unfortunately, that's not Q method, that's just an initial sort into buckets (probably best used for sorting into agree, disagree, neutral, before the main sort). I haven't seen or heard of a way to use Qualtrics to sort statements into the chosen grid, have you? Could this be adapted? Unfortunately, in-person Q sort isn't going to be possible for most researchers any time soon!

Hi Christoph, I haven't had luck with either. The former is free for a very small study (no more than 10 participants/10 statements), and is otherwise $99/month for students (for me this is a prohibitive cost). The latter does not appear to work anymore, and my understanding is the person who designed it has now created an updated system that is quite expensive to use. I am going to try VQMethod, but I am also having trouble with that website.

Hi Brittany,

thanks for the heads up. I just bookmarked both websites and quickly came to the same conclusion yesterday, after trying to test them.

I'll give VQMethod a try then.

I used approximas hmtl5 once to host a survey on a web page

https://github.com/aproxima/htmlq

Worked well

I can confirm, that even though the aproxima html5 is several years old, it still works with current browsers. Just got it running.

This looks promising, too. https://qtip.geography.wisc.edu/

Oh wow, Kate, that looks beautiful! Is it available for larger studies? I am planning, right now, to use the VQMethod website. The developer has been offering some help and feedback on using it, and I am happy to share my experience with it.

Hi Brittany,

Did you find a solution to your question? What platform did you use finally?

I am working in a project where we will need to use a platform to do a survey through the Q-sorting online. An added problem, maybe, is that we will do that in English and in French.

Hi Adriana,

I did! As did Christoph, here, as he noted. (Using the link that Nils posted)

I wasn't able to make contact with or figure out the above Q sort made through the University of Wisconsin.

I decided to use VQ (vqmethod.com) and converted my textual statements to images so they could be shown as cards. This was free to do, and I'm happy to share more if you contact me (you can find my email by looking up my name and university or on LinkedIn).

In VQ you could make two different Q sorts (if you are presenting the language either/or; I am doing this for two study populations, though all in English), or if you want both languages concurrently, and your statements are short enough, you could probably fit them on the same card with the method I used. Some of the instructions may, however, default to English, but you could check with the person behind it.

Let me know if you want to chat!

Brittany

Thank you very much! I am going to explore that option and two others. If I have some other doubts I will write you :)

Adriana

Try this one:

http://www.qsortware.net

It is free and fairly easy to use with some explanations on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf9c_9jwMuI

and a couple of other videos.

Thank you, I will explore it. It seems a good option :)

So has anyone actually used Qualtrics to create a q-sorting activity?

By the way, KADE is worth exploring for analysing your results:

https://github.com/shawnbanasick/kade

I need to explore in more detail but seems viable (and useful) according to reports from researchers who have used it.

Hi James,

thanks for sharing KADE. So far, I went with the `qmethod' package by Ariola Zabala:

https://github.com/aiorazabala/qmethod

she also programmed it in shiny:

https://azabala.shinyapps.io/qmethod-gui/

Personally, it does exactly what I want it to do. The code is also written quite transparent (at least for my taste). So whenever I was wondering what is actually being calculated, the functions are written very intuitively.

Hi

I am wondering about using https://qmethodsoftware.com/ but can't find any info about how they store data securely. In fact I can't find much reference to that across any of the online platforms. In terms of ethics - how have others discussed data storage issues? Thanks

Hi Carrie,

I hope this finds you well! As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I used/am using VQMethod online, and I discussed the storage system there with the person behind that platform (which has cloud storage, and I will delete it once I have completed my research). I then put consent for using this online platform into my IRB/consent form that all participants sign. I would be curious how other programs handle this, so please post if you find anything!

Can these q-sort programs be embedded in a Google forms survey?

Hej Miriam Shelton

honestly, not sure. My experience with the Aproxima htmlQ tool was however throughout positive. You need to download the package from their github repository and then modify it to your needs. However, there is one very tiny trick to get this running from your computer. In order to have a preview to your Q-study you must commit a little change to your firefox settings:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful or accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste uniq and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the privacy.file_unique_origin preference to switch the value from true (secure) to false (insecure)

Once you are happy with the study design, I would talk to the IT department of your institute. Just tell them you need to host the index.html file so that external study participants can access this. You can also host this on your own if you have a private server. However, this might take some time to set it up yourself. For the IT guys it's usually a job of 2min to get this file hosted.

Cheers,

Chris

Hi all, Hi Shahab,

I tried to use VQmethod. I registered and tried a test in VQmethod, and at first everything looked good but I kept getting the below error message after entering statements. Would anyone kindly be able to help? Or is there any other good and free online software i can use to run my Q-sort? Thanks.

Error message:

Input string was not in a correct format.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if anyone here uses KADE software for their Q methodology thesis/ I am facing few technical errors in uploading excel files as input and the desktop KADE software application keeps giving me this message: " no stack trace available" ...please help me solve this out ..Thank you so much