| Abstract: | A disqualification is a message that says something “without really saying it”—one that is evasive, indirect, or effectively ambiguous in some other way. This article describes the rationale for, and development of, an objective method for measuring the degree of disqualification in brief written messages: nonexpert judges independently assess four basic elements of the message (sender, content, receiver, context) for ambiguity, by use of a physical scale of length. The raw scale values are standardized for each judge, and the reliability of these values is quite high. Research uses of the method, as well as its limitations and possible modifications, are discussed. |
