WLS Codebooks

Note: Codebooks contain frequency data from the private data release. For some variables, these differ from the frequencies in the public release. Variables that differ between the public and private versions include "(not available on public release)" as part of the variable description, or a note indicating the difference between the public and private versions.

Phone: Nisbett Items

Phone: UNCAT - Nisbett Item Categorization: Taxonomic or Theoretical

OVERVIEW
 
  The following series of categorization items were provided by Professor
  Richard E. Nisbett University of Michigan to test whether Americans 
  think more holistically as they age. The interviewer reads the following 
  instructions to the respondent:

    "Now I am going to read you lists of three things. For each list I will
    ask you to indicate which two of the three are most closely related.
    There are no right or wrong answers. We are just interested in your
    judgments".

  The interviewer then reads three words, which appear one at
  a time on the interviewer's computer screen. Once the interviewer finishes,
  the respondent selected any two words that he or she thought most closely 
  related. The interviewer repeated repeated the list if necessary. However,
  respondents were not allowed for duplicate answers. There were twelve sets 
  of word lists.
  
  In The Geography of Thought: how Asians and Westerners think differently -- 
  and why By Richard E. Nisbett, 2003, Simon and Schuster, Nisbett shows that
  people actually think about -- and even see -- the world differently because
  of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational
  systems that date back to ancient Greece and China and that have survived
  into the modern world. As a result, East Asian thought is "holistic" --
  drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and
  events within that field. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East
  Asian thought relies far less on categories or on formal logic; it is
  fundamentally dialectic, seeking a "middle way" between opposing thoughts.
  By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes
  to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand
  their behavior.

  Is it Culture Or Is It Language? Ji, Zhang, and Nisbett, Journal of
  Personality and Social Psychology 2004, Vol. 87, No. 1, 57?65.

  Categorization is about organizing the world. Objects can be
  organized and classified together because they share taxonomic
  categories or because they share thematic relations. Taxonomic
  categorization (or category-based classification) is made on the
  basis of similarity of attributes, such as similarities in perceptual
  properties among objects, whereas thematic categorization
  (or relationship-based classification) is made on the basis of
  causal, spatial, and temporal relationships among objects
  (Markman & Hutchinson, 1984). For example, if people are
  given the triplet seagull,squirrel,tree and asked which two go
  together, the choice seagull,squirrel indicates a taxonomic
  categorization, whereas squirrel,tree suggests a thematic categorization.
 
  This set of questions were added after some of the sibling spouses were 
  already in the field.  bn001re indicates if the sib spouse was asked these
  questions.

BRIEF VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS

  bn001re               Indicates if respondent is in the sample.

  bn002re               Percentage of holistic replies to categorization items

  bn003re - bn014re     Replies to Nisbett categorization items

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