Category norms: An updated and expanded version of the Battig and Montague (1969) norms

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2003.10.003Get rights and content

Abstract

The Battig and Montague (1969) category norms have been an invaluable tool for researchers in many fields, with a recent literature search revealing their use in over 1600 projects published in more than 200 different journals. Since 1969, numerous changes have occurred culturally that warrant the collection of new normative data. For instance, in the mid-1960s, the waltz was a popular dance, and undergraduates wore rubbers on their feet. To meet the need for updated norms, we report an expanded version of the Battig and Montague (1969) norms, based on responses from three different sites varying in geographical locations within the United States. The norms were expanded to include new categories (e.g., ad hoc categories) and new measures, most notably latencies for the generated responses. Analyses demonstrated high levels of geographical stability across the new sites, with lower and more variable levels of generational stability between the Battig and Montague norms and the current norms.

Section snippets

Participants

In order to sample from possibly diverse sets of people, participants were selected from three universities in different regions of the United States: University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB), University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP), and University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). At least 300 participants were presented with each category at UCB, and at least 150 participants were presented with each category at UMCP and UNCG, for a total of at least 600 participants per category (M

Results

The response data for each category are presented in the Appendix. All intelligible responses were included in the analyses (less than 1% of the responses were unintelligible and were removed), and responses that were misspelled (e.g., Afganistan) were included under a response spelled correctly (e.g., Afghanistan). The responses were then tallied separately for each location.

The Appendix contains separate tables for the 70 categories, organized in a manner similar to the 1969 norms. However,

References (3)

  • W.F Battig et al.

    Category norms for verbal items in 56 categories: A replication and extension of the Connecticut norms using University of Maryland and Illinois students (Tech. Rep.)

    (1968)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (464)

View all citing articles on Scopus

This research was funded, in part, by a post-doctoral fellowship from the University of Maryland Department of Psychology, National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship, Army Research Institute Contract DASW01-99-K-0002 (Alice F. Healy, principal investigator), and Army Research Office Grant DAAG55-98-1-0214 (Alice Healy, principal investigator). We gratefully acknowledge Robin Abelson (University of Maryland) for her extensive assistance hand-scoring much of the raw data, compiling the data into a form useable for the manuscript, and for generating the inter-generational correlations. We also thank Matthew Brallier (University of North Carolina), Rosemary Brumbelow (University of Maryland), John Crews (University of North Carolina), Anita Gray (University of Colorado), Greg Hofer (University of Colorado), and Michael Serra (University of North Carolina) for their assistance with data collection.

View full text