Category norms: a comparison of the Battig and Montague (1969) norms with the responses of adults between the ages of 20 and 80.

In order to determine whether category norms collected from college students are appropriate for research with older adults, 25 men and 25 women in each of three age groups, Young (20 to 39 years), Middle (40 to 59 years) and Old (60 to 79 years), were asked to produce as many category members as possible for each of 21 categories chosen from those included in the Battig and Montague (1969) norms. The correlations between the responses of the present subjects and Battig and Montague's were high for all three age groups studied. It is concluded that for most of the categories studied here, it is appropriate to use the Battig and Montague norms when choosing stimuli for experiments with middle-aged and elderly adults. Additional analyses revealed that the Old group produced fewer responses per person per category than the Young and Middle groups. Analyses of between-subject variability indicated that the subjects in the Old group were less likely than the younger subjects to produce unique, idiosyncratic responses.