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Sometimes, often, and always: Exploring the vague meanings of frequency expressions
- Source :
- Behavior Research Methods. 44:144-157
- Publication Year :
- 2011
- Publisher :
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2011.
-
Abstract
- The article describes a general two-step procedure for the numerical translation of vague linguistic terms (LTs). The suggested procedure consists of empirical and model components, including (1) participants' estimates of numerical values corresponding to verbal terms and (2) modeling of the empirical data using fuzzy membership functions (MFs), respectively. The procedure is outlined in two studies for data from N = 89 and N = 109 participants, who were asked to estimate numbers corresponding to 11 verbal frequency expressions (e.g., sometimes). Positions and shapes of the resulting MFs varied considerably in symmetry, vagueness, and overlap and are indicative of the different meanings of the vague frequency expressions. Words were not distributed equidistantly across the numerical scale. This has important implications for the many questionnaires that use verbal rating scales, which consist of frequency expressions and operate on the premise of equidistance. These results are discussed for an exemplar questionnaire (COPSOQ). Furthermore, the variation of the number of prompted LTs (5 vs. 11) showed no influence on the words' interpretations.
- Subjects :
- Adult
Male
Adolescent
Scale (ratio)
Poison control
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
computer.software_genre
Fuzzy logic
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
Rating scale
Surveys and Questionnaires
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Humans
Verbal Rating Scale
General Psychology
Language
business.industry
Communication
Linguistics
Vagueness
Variation (linguistics)
Premise
Female
Psychology (miscellaneous)
Artificial intelligence
business
Psychology
computer
Natural language processing
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15543528
- Volume :
- 44
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Behavior Research Methods
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....d7e4879ced57c3c829714024e8d1edd4