Relationships Between Number of Verbal Associations to Value Words and Subjective Ratings of Values

This study attempts to demonstrate whether or not there is a relationship between Ss\u27 rankings of statements descriptive of Spranger\u27s values and the number of verbal associations made by the same Ss to nouns referring to these values. Noble (2) has demonstrated that one may define the meaningfulness of a stimulus word in terms of the number of associations to this word written by Ss within a prescribed time. Bousfield and Samborski (1) using the written association method of Noble attempted to test the hypothesis that for individuals the relative strength of personal values should correlate positively with the extent of meaningfulness of words related to these values. To test this hypothesis they correlated two measures of the same values derived from the same group of Ss. These were (a) strengths of Spranger\u27s values based on the Study of Values Scale of Allport, Vernon and Lindzey and (b) meaningfulness of words related to the Spranger values obtained by Noble\u27s (2) method. Two of the six values investigated, religious and theoretical, showed significant correlations