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However, it suffers from the following limitations:

◆ The respondent may allocate more or fewer units than
specified.

◆ There may be a rounding error if too few units are allocated.
On the other hand, if a large number of units are used, it could
be burdensome for the respondents and adversely affect the
result.
◆ This technique cannot be applied among children and
uneducated people.

◆ If any attribute is not important, the respondent may assign
zero point to the same.

◆ If an attribute is of equal importance to any other attribute,
that attribute receives twice as many points.
Example:
In selecting a shampoo, indicate the importance you attach to
each of the following four aspects by allotting points for each to
total 100.

◆ Colour
◆ Fragrance

◆ Brand
◆ Conditioning effect

An example for the response to this question can be-

◆ Colour-0

◆ Fragrance-15
◆ Brand-30
◆ Conditioning effect-55

iv. Q-sort scaling

Q-sort scaling uses a rank order procedure to sort objects
based on similarity with respect to some criterion. The important
characteristic of this methodology is that it is more important to
make comparisons among different responses of a respondent than
the responses between different respondents. In this method the ◆ Comparisons among
respondent is given a statement in a large number for describing different responses
the characteristics of a product or a large number of brands of a of a respondent
product. It is suitable in the case where the number of objects is
not less than 60 and more than 140, the most appropriate of all
ranging between 60 to 90.

SGOU - SLM - MCom Research Methodology 107