Program Abstracts/Algorithms An SPSS program to compute subjective organization

This paper describes an SPSS program that computes four common subjective organization measures: Pelle­ grino's (1971) ARC' for bidirectional pairs and un­ ordered triplets, Thlving's (1962) measurefor bidirec­ tional pairs, and Bousfield and Bousfield's (1966) deviation measure, Thisprogramcan compute these mea­ sures between any two tests for an unlimited numberof to-be-remembereditems, Free recall methodology involves the presentation ofa list of items, followed by instructions to recall as many items as possible in any order. In contrast to other meth­ ods, this method allows investigators the advantage of analyzing the way in which subjects organize the items in order to facilitate recall, Especially when a test is re­ peatedly administered, it becomes apparent that subjects are not recalling items randomly (see, e.g., Tulving, 1962). Even though a list may not include any obvious structure, subjects recall items in a relatively fixed order. This phenomenon is commonly known as subjective organization. Unfortunately, the computation of subjective organi­ zation is excessively complex and laborious. In addition, there are many measures from which to choose (see Stem­ burg & Tulving, 1977, for a review). Ironically, the only computer programs thus far available compute measures not commonly used in the experimental literature (Bate­ son & De Vader, 1990) or are based on obsolete technol­ ogy (Pellegrino, 1974). In this paper, we provide a program that will compute some of the more commonly used subjective organiza­ tion measures (as suggested by Murphy & Puff, 1982). These include: Pellegrino's ARC' for bidirectional pairs (ARC) and unordered triplets (TARC), Tulving's (1962) measure ofsubjective organization (SO) for bidirectional pairs, and Bousfield and Bousfield's (1966) deviation measure for bidirectional pairs (DS). (See Table I for the computational basis for these measures.) To facilitate data analysis, we decided to use the statistical package