Abstract Concept Mapping (CM) is promoted as a research method suitable for interdisciplinary and international research, “… best suited to applications where diverse or wide-ranging opinions need to be gathered and made sense of." Our study does not support these claims. We created a situation where 54 statements were sorted on just 2 different attributes. Neither the conventional analytic approach in CM nor alternative clustering algorithms appear able to reveal these attributes. CM may be appropriate to use when groups can be assumed to be homogeneous, but CM cannot test this assumption. Discovering which attributes are used by sorters requires thematic analysis or focus groups.
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Kampen et al. (2024) studied this question.
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