Thanks for your reply Chris Chapman! I didn’t know that LCA could estimate segments alongside utilities.

I’d like to apply the methods you described in this blog to a current project. My survey includes some additional questions besides the MaxDiff tasks, and I don’t want to stretch participants’ patience too much. I’m wondering if it’s feasible to show each item an average of only two times per respondent and still obtain informative individual-level results. Or do you think this would be a “bad” idea and that it’s better to avoid analyzing individual scores in this case?

The answer is probably, “It depends,” but if I’m not conducting a segmentation study and just want to identify whether some items seem particularly important to certain respondents, could the following principle apply? “Our job is to help make decisions under uncertainty. We aim to take better bets. Sometimes it’s acceptable to show items only twice on average, if that’s the best we can reasonably do.”

Thomas Hettig That is exactly what I would do — run the survey with the best experience I can to get good data from a good respondent experience, and not worry about whether I have some "right" number of observations.

The other thing I would say is this: for any single individual, the specific estimates in that case are imprecise, but the overall averages & estimated numbers of individuals preferring one thing or another will be precise. Unless you are specifically targeting individuals, that is good enough for almost everything (some forms of segmentation being the exception).

Cool! Thank you so much Chris!