Categorization Tendency (Chronic)

What it measures

A five-item scale measuring an individual's stable tendency to mentally organise and group objects, events, personalities, and products into categories based on perceived similarities. Items tap enjoyment of grouping, ease of perceiving similarities, and habitual categorisation behaviour across domains. Designed to capture a domain-general categorisation disposition rather than domain-specific expertise, the scale is applicable to research examining how individual differences in categorical thinking shape product perception, price judgments, and decision making.

Response format

7-point Likert

Scale items

• I tend to categorize things (e.g., objects, events, personalities, products).
• I enjoy grouping things in mind.
• It is usually easy for me to see similarities between things.
• I find myself geared toward categorizing things (e.g., objects, products, events, personalities).
• It feels easy for me to see similarities between things.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Alpha across versions used: α = .79 (Study 1B) and α = .80 (Study 4) — Park, Lalwani & Silvera (2020). The .79 lower bound falls below the preferred threshold; the scale is included on the basis of the .80 estimate from Study 4. VALIDITY: Not discussed. Four slightly different 3-item and 5-item versions of the scale were used across studies (web appendix); the 5-item version is presented here. Scale appears to have been created by one of the authors. NOTE: Multiple versions exist — researchers should select the version that best suits their study length requirements and report which version they used.

Citation

Park, Hanyong, Ashok K. Lalwani, and David H. Silvera (2020). The impact of resource scarcity on price-quality judgments. Journal of Consumer Research, 46(6), 1110–1124.

Keywords