04/16/07
			                                     cor948a.txt

      SNCAT - Sibling 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 list.
  
  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.
  
  
BRIEF VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS

  cn001re		Indicates if respodent is in the sample.

  cn002re		Percentage of holistic replies to categorization items

  cn003re - cn014re     Replies to Nisbett categorization items
  
  
CODING

  cn002re

    Four filler items (cn004re, cn006re, cn010re, cn012re) are not included in
    the denominator. And the maximum number for denominator is 8. Then, number of 
    holistic replies is divided by total number of answers that a respodent 
    actually made. For those who stopped interview before session was completed,
    the number of answers they made util that point is counted.

  cn003re - cn014re

    These variables receive a "DON'T KNOW" response when respodent says it either
    for the first or the second word. Also, these variables receive a "REFUSED" 
    response when respodent says it either for the first or the second word. There
    was no respondents who said DON'T KNOW and REFUSED for an item.  


NOTES

  
PEOPLE

    Tass Hauser - Documentation, Supervision of variable creation process
    
    Keuntae Kim - Variable creation, Preparation for cor document