Folderings

Our method for analysis of the EIA database is primarily to cluster completed questionnaires into folders that can be analyzed and compared. Each user has a “home” folder which contains all their completed questionnaires. In general, your analysis will be done on the home folder when you seek global patterns.  

The foldering becomes important when you want to identify impulse management trends within a particular category.  An example of this might be a time category.  Imagine, for example, that you have been on some sort of specific diet for a period of time.  You may want to compare your patterns when on the diet to the patterns you have before that  diet.  Or imagine that you have some sort of seasonal thing going on (as in seasonal affective disorder) and want to see if your patterns are different in your down season from your up season.

However some of the most illuminating patterns and relationships come from sub-clustering questionnaires into separate folders that will be done for you when you use several levels of the first analytic tool.

To help you understand this important point, we present the following example of Mrs. Hypothetical Jones: