Semantic Differential

Definition

Osgood's technique for measuring what meanings people attach to concepts: subjects rate items (in environmental research: rooms, buildings, built forms) against bipolar adjective scales (bad/good, dirty/clean, dark/light…), locating each meaning "with some accuracy" in a multi-dimensional "semantic space." Pioneered for the built environment by R. G. Hershberger, who "tried to establish a basic set of scales for use in environmental research," and applied by C. A. Acking — who projected slides of interiors, had subjects mark each room against concept scales, and measured feelings of comfort and security, estimations of social status, physical appearance and degree of originality — and by B. Honikman, who asked subjects to rate pictures of rooms against such scales.

The principal criticism (and the reason the Repertory Grid was adapted to environmental research): "the scales in use are set up by the experimenter. This raises the obvious problems of any social survey; that the scales themselves may suggest things to people which otherwise they might never have thought of. At the same time, they may ask people to think of things (including buildings) in ways which they find quite impossible."

The application limit Broadbent draws (1980): even if a form were "overwhelmingly more popular," building only that type would make it "so boring that people no longer preferred it" — the differential's real value is diagnostic (comparing the constructs of architect and client, student and teacher), not prescriptive.

Related Methods

• Repertory Grid — Kelley's subject-generated-constructs corrective to the differential's experimenter-set scales.
• four-types-of-design — the design-generation context into which Broadbent hoped such findings would feed.

Source Support

• Architectural Objects and Their Design as a Subject for Semiotic Studies (Broadbent 1980) — the pragmatics section: Osgood's "three-dimensional 'semantic space'"; Hershberger's scale set; Acking's interior slides (comfort/security, social status, originality); Honikman's room ratings; the experimenter-scales objection and the "boring" application limit; Chris Abel's use of the techniques to relate students' architectural constructs to their designs.
• Architecture and the Human Sciences (Broadbent 1973) — the empirical-methods context and the embryo-science caution the techniques grew up inside. See environmental-psychology, empirical-methods.

Notes

• Requires fuller treatment: Osgood, Suci & Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning (1957); the semantic differential's later career in post-occupancy evaluation. (Logged.)