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Category Creation Essay

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1. TDO 6.3 discusses several principles that can be used for category creation (enumeration, single property, multiple property, similarity, etc.). Identify at least three principles for creating categories that are in use in the census form. Tie each of the principles you identify to at least one specific census question. Explain what each principle is and how it is being used. Single property: The question – “What is the person's sex?” is categorized into a single property as the response to this question is either male or female. The gender property is an intrinsic static property of the person. Here the single property of gender is pragmatically relevant in categorizing the resource to male or female. Family resemblance: "What is this person’s …show more content…

Assumptions and biases are unavoidable in organizing but it is important to be thoughtful about your own assumptions when you are creating categories and for you to be able to critically assess other categories that you encounter. Suggest modifications to the census form that you would make to address each of the assumptions you articulated in part 3 above. Are you suggesting new principles for creating the categories? Are you suggesting the use of different …show more content…

The addition of this property along with 'other' would provide more granularities to this question and would eliminate the assumption made. The question on the race of the person could be modified such that there is a clear hierarchal structure to the categorization of multiple properties. For example, Asian could be constructed as a hypernym having sub-categories such as Chinese, Japanese. A well-defined hierarchal structure would provide more granularities to the properties. Again, the question inquiring the highest degree or level of school of the person could greatly benefit from a hierarchal structure that would assign properties into different sub categories such as school grade or college degree. Separating all the grades into each individual property could eliminate the bias from the result of the survey. 5. Reflect on this process. Your reflection does not need to be limited to the following questions but make sure to at least address each of these questions. Was it difficult to analyze the assumptions and biases that might be present? Did using the design questions help you? Which design questions seemed most useful, were any of them not useful? Can you identify any of your own assumptions or biases in the modifications you suggested in part 4

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