Normed vs. Dictionary 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.

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: Toxicity's toxicity_measures are dictionary-counted but toxicity_likelihood are likelihoods in the 0 to 1 range.

Normed Measures

The Big 5 Personality, Social Dynamics, Drives, Needs and Values, Interpersonal Circumplex, and DISC 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.

Normed measures are comprised of building block components that contribute to the psychological phenomenon being measured. Some measures are comprised of one component, while other measures are comprised of multiple components. Scores for measures that are comprised of multiple components are a weighted average of the normed component scores.

A normed component with a score of 80 indicates that 80% of the samples in our curated baseline dataset have scores lower than the analyzed language sample.

Note: The DISC framework is unique in that the final bold_assertive_outgoing, calm_methodical_reserved, people_relationship_emotion_focus, and task_system_object_focus scores are re-normed.