Normed vs. Dictionary-Counted Measures

About

Receptiviti’s measures can be separated into two categories: normalized (normed) measures, and dictionary-counted measures. This is an important distinction for those who are looking to combine and compare multiple measures for the purpose of extracting insights.

Types of Measures

Normed Measures

The Big 5 Personality, Social Dynamics, Drives, and Needs and Values frameworks all contain normed measures. This means that we have carefully curated the measures so that they are baselined against our proprietary datasets, which consist of language samples that exceed 350 words. Normed measures will always provide scores in the range of 0 to 100. A language sample that generates a score of 80 implies that 80% of all samples in our curated baseline dataset have scores that are less than the score of the language sample being analyzed.

Dictionary-Counted Measures

The LIWC, LIWC Extension, Emotions (SALLEE), Temporal and Orientation, Cognition, and Toxicity frameworks all contain dictionary-counted measures: for each submitted text sample, Receptiviti analyzes one word at a time. As each word is processed, the dictionary file is searched by category, looking for a category match with the current word. If the target word is matched with a category word, the appropriate word category scale (or scales) for that word is incremented. While SALLEE operates slightly differently than LIWC, LIWC Extension, Temporal and Orientation, and Cognition, these six frameworks count words in a similar fashion. Dictionary-counted measures will always provide scores in a range of 0 to 1, except for SALLEE’s sentiment measures, which will always fall between -1.0 to +1.0. Note that Toxicity's toxicity_measures are dictionary-counted but that toxicity_likelihood are likelihoods in the 0 to 1 range.