Measurement of Meaning through Verbal Associations and Other Empirical Methods.
Abstract
The investigations reported are part of a broader study aimed at developing improved measurement and communication capabilities for bridging ethnic, racial, and cultural differences. The focus of the study was a comparative analysis of research methods to validate association-based indices used by the Associative Group Analysis method, a continued word association technique. Two groups of 30 subjects participated in the study. In addition to the verbal association-based indices, the investigations included classical meaning similarity measures, attitudinal-evaluative measures, and semantic differential measures designed to represent various strategies of scale selection. The new verbal association-based similarity measure showed high positive correlation with most of the other measures of meaning similarity. The standard semantic differential was the exception: it produced no significant correlations with any of the similarity measures. However, the semantic differential did produce high positive correlations with the attitude measures. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 1972
- Accession Number
- AD0750003
Entities
People
- Jean A. Bryson
- Lorand B. Szalay
Organizations
- American Institutes for Research