Estudio de cuantificadores lingüísticos de frecuencia y de cantidad

Abstract

A number of scales use response categories such as "Always", "Often", "Very" or "Not too", and researchers administering these scales usually assume that the resultant data are interval in nature. However, we know little about the scale characteristics of such quantifying terms. On the other hand, many researchers have made evident that the quantifiers exact meaning is hard to establish and doubt about the supposed constancy component in the meaning of such expressions. So, many surveys have examined the influence that determinate factors may have over the meaning that respondents assume to this type of quantifier expressions in the psychological rating context. Factors such as format, position, adverbs modifiers, etc. have been studied, but perhaps the more approached factor has been the context influence (expected frequency, importance of the topic, etc.), and researchers emphasize the importance of consider the context in the words meaning determination. This paper presents an attempt of clarifying the level of measurement provided by these response categories. Drawing on previous English language research concerning the frequency and amount of meanings of these adverbs, a study using a sample of 154 students was performed to determine the distances between the adverbs. In this way, magnitude estimation was employed to obtain the numerical equivalents of 40 expressions of frequency from "Never" to "Always" and 40 expressions of amount ranging from "Nothing" to "Totally", extracted from Spanish Language. Geometric means and standard deviations are provided for each expression as well as suggestions for statistically optimal anchors, for psychological rating scales. The percentages of in judgments overlapping for adjacent points on scales are also given. Likewise, we studied the possible influence that context, conceived as topic importance, could exert on the meaning of such quantifier expressions. Only the amount expressions were sensitive to the topic importance.