EVALUATION OF A TECHNIQUE FOR MEASURING SUBJECTIVE SIMILARITY

The purpose was to develop and test a scaling technique simple enough to be useful in developmental studies. The basic assumption was that consistent quantitative judgments can be obtained from children when the task is simply to place two stimuli in such a way that their spatial proximity corresponds to their subjective similarity. Children as young as six years were able to carry out the task consistently. The reliability of the technique was quite high with simple material and appeared satisfactory even when complex stimuli were scaled. Methods for analyzing the results are discussed. Factorization of the proximity matrices yielded the expected dimensions. Some pilot experiments are reported illustrating the use of the technique with complex stimulus materials.