The Egocentric Index does not have a real zero point either theoretically or practically (remember, calculation of the Egocentric Index requires 12-36 months of cumulative verbal behavior. Nothing regarding Egocentric verbal behavior can or should be said about just a few postings.). The real usefulness of the Egocentric Index is that it provides an empirical method to order posters (in this context) along a construct dimension of Egocentrism from low to high. I expect a very small correlation between volumn of posts and proportion of self-refential terms used by posters. Surely some high volume posters will have _relatively_ lower Egocentric indexes than some other high volumn posters.

-----Original Message----- From: Dale McLerran <stringplayer_2@YAHOO.COM> Sent: Jan 21, 2004 2:24 PM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: RE - Little Birdies fyi

Having only followed this thread sporadicically, here are a few thoughts which apparently have not yet been expressed. Every effort is being taken in this post to avoid terms which would give a non-zero egocentricity score. It is very difficult, when trying to respond to non-technical postings, to avoid self-referencing terms outside of quotations marks. Nontechnical postings are opinion pieces, by and large. As opinion pieces, it is not unreasonable that there should be a liberal sprinkling of self-referencing terms such as "I believe" or "My perception". Thus, all egocentricity is not equal. Those who participate in threads such as this one more than in technical threads might be expected to have higher egocentricity indices. How should one interpret egocentricity in such different contexts. Perhaps in the technical threads, writing in the third person should be the norm, but in subjective content threads first person writing should be the norm. Indeed, if a person were to attempt to pass off subjective content in third person writing rather than first person writing, there should be demerit for such postings! The writer should identify the content as his/her opinion. Therefore, this posting should probably suffer as an opinion piece written in third person style. Your forgiveness is begged here, as it is a rather laborious process to write opinion without representing such thoughts as the writers own.

Perhaps it has been mentioned in some other postings which have not been read by this author, but it is this authors opinion that a person with subject matter expertise on a given topic who has answered some question before in great detail at considerable personal cost of time and effort might respond quite appropriately with a post which says, in effect, "I addressed this question on a previous occasion. Here is a link to that previous post." Attribution by the author that he/she wrote the previous piece directs the correspondents attention in a linked posting to substantive expertise by the respondent him/herself. It is easy to gloss over who the poster was in a linked posting. It is this authors opinion that linked postings ought to have proper attribution of authorship. Therefore, crediting the authorship to oneself is not at all unreasonable, although the posting would then have a high egocentricity index. Should the most prolific authors on this list be identified as bad boys/girls because they reference their own previous postings rather than repeatedly forming long responses of like kind to a question that has been posed repeatedly?

Just a couple of this authors thoughts on this egocentricity index idea. This author might be amused to see such an index presented, especially with the other indexes of cognitive simplicity/complexity, fluency, etc. But it certainly should be presented in such a way that it is for amusement purposes only, and the person(s) with high egocentricity index might be roundly celebrated.

Dale

--- Joe Whitehurst <joewhite@MINDSPRING.COM> wrote: > It is indeed written in SAS. When I return from my current road trip > (in 3-4 weeks) I will post the code (I don't have it with me). It > would be nice to have some others confirm the results before the new > SAS-L Emitter of Cumulative Egocentric Verbal Behavior Maven (ECEVBM) > is crowned. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Jack Hamilton <JackHamilton@FIRSTHEALTH.COM> > Sent: Jan 21, 2004 12:34 PM > To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: Re: RE - Little Birdies fyi > > I don't remember whether you said what the code is written in. If > it's > in SAS, can you post the code or a pointer to it? It might be useful > for other projects. > > > > > -- > JackHamilton@FirstHealth.com > Manager, Technical Development > Metrics Department, First Health > West Sacramento, California USA > > >>> "Joe Whitehurst" <joewhite@MINDSPRING.COM> 01/21/2004 6:26 AM >>> > The code for creating the Egocentric Index distinguishes code from > prose by examining each clause in the cumulative sample. Those > clauses > with some combination of SAS operators, %signs, and ampersands will > be > classified as code. As an aside, the code produces many indexes, not > just the Egocentric Index. For this reason, the output includes > sentence counts, range of vocabulary, type/token ratios, and clause > counts. From these outputs, additional measures are produced like > cognitive simplicity-complexity, general intelligence and fluency, > for > examples.

===== --------------------------------------- Dale McLerran Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center mailto: dmclerra@fhcrc.org Ph: (206) 667-2926 Fax: (206) 667-5977 ---------------------------------------

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