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Aging And The Semantic Differential: Semantic Stability In The Measurement Of Social Evaluation, Marilyn Diane Petersen

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this investigation was to assess the validity of utilizing the same semantic differential test as a measure of social evaluation for persons of different ages. The semantic differential, a rating technique by which judgments of stimuli are made on seven-interval bipolar descriptive continua called "scales", currently receives widespread usage as a measure of attitudes toward aging and the elderly. However, a lack of semantic stability across stimuli and across subjects, known, respectively, as "concept-scale" and "subject-scale" interaction, has been found to occur with the technique in various areas of research. That such a lack of stability might …