PROTOTYPICALITY AND CATEGORYALITY IN STUDY OF SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS

The anchoring of the prototypicality and categoryality criteria in the study of the social representations implies the achievement of a congruence between the frequency of occurrence and the average rank of occurrence of the elements that make up these representations (as an exception, according to the researcher’s predilections, instead of the average rank of the occurrence of a term, the average rank of the relevance of the same term may be used in the association). The previously mentioned congruence can be obtained either traditionally - by calculating the Spearman’s correlation coefficient - or in a less usual way - through the tabular technique of an investigative procedure consisting of five distinct phases - data collection, the calculation of frequency and average rank indicators, table making, table reading, the creation of categories