Measuring Associative Strength: Category-Item Associations and Their Activation from Memory

Three measures of the strength of association between a category and members of the category were investigated: (a) a naming measure, in which the participants (93 undergraduates) were asked to list the members of a category and the listing order was assumed to reflect associative strength; (b) a latency measure, which assessed the latency to correctly identify specific items as members or nonmembers of a given category; and (c) a facilitation measure, in which the spontaneous activation of an item upon presentation of a category label as a prime was assessed by considering the extent to which the prime facilitated recognition of an initially degraded (visually obscured) item. The three measures correlated substantially, thus validating the naming and latency measures as reasonable approximations of the likelihood that a given item will receive activation in memory when the category is presented. Many of the constructs of interest to survey researchers can be viewed similarly as associations in memory, and the naming and latency measures can be fruitfully used in surveys; research attesting to the utility of naming and latency data is reviewed. The present research concerns the assessment of associative strength. Various measures of associative strength are examined, in the hope of establishing their validity as approximations of the likelihood that a given construct will be activated from memory upon presentation of the stimulus. After briefly reviewing evidence from the attitudes literature that illustrates the value of an associative perspective, we shall argue that many additional constructs of interest to survey researchers also may be fruitfully viewed as associations in memory. We will then report research aimed at validating two measures of associative strength that are sufficiently straightforward to be employed in a survey context. The measurement of associative strength is often an important goal of survey researchers, although usually not an explicit one. Surveys seek to identify what

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