The Relation between Category-Rating and Magnitude-Estimation Judgments of Occupational Prestige

Abstract

The studies to be reported here were designed to determine whether the curvilinear relationship found between sensory scales based on judgments of differences and sensory scales based on judgments of ratios also would be found with scales of meaningful stimuli.1 This relationship has been attributed to differences in S's ability to discriminate one stimulus-magnitude from another. At the low end of prothetic dimensions, discrimination is said to be fine, with each judgmental category of the difference-scale covering only a small segment of the continuum; at the high end, it is poor, resulting in broader categories. If ratio-judgments are unaffected by the region of the continuum from which the stimuli are drawn, the difference-scale units, will encompass more ratio-scale units at the lower than at the upper ends of prothetic continua. It also has been proposed that the relationship between ratio-scale and differencescale values approaches linearity when the latter are plotted against the logs of the former.2 Stevens and Galanter believe that the attainment of linearity depends upon the spacing of the stimuli being judged.3