psychotree (version 0.9-0)

Firstnames: Popularity of First Names

Description

Preferences of 192 respondents choosing among six boys names with respect to their popularity.

Usage

data("Firstnames")

encoding

latin1

Details

A survey was conducted at the Department of Psychology, Universit�t T�bingen, in June 2009. The sample was stratified by gender and age (younger versus older than 30 years) with 48 participants in each group. The interviewers were Psychology Master's students who collected the data for course credits.

Participants were presented with 15 pairs of boys names in random order. On each trial, their task was to choose the name they would rather give to their own child. The pairs of boys names were read to the participants one at a time. A given participant compared each pair in one order only, hence the NA's in ordered.pref.

The names were selected to fall within the upper (Tim, Lucas), mid (Michael, Robin) and lower (Benedikt, Julius) range of the top 100 of the most popular boys names in Germany in the years from 1990 to 1999 (http://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/3778-1990er-jahre.htm). The names have either front (e, i) or back (o, u) vowels in the stressed syllables. Phonology of the name and attractiveness of a person have been shown to be related (Perfors, 2004; Hartung et al., 2009).

References

Hartung, F., Klenovsak, D., Santiago dos Santos, L., Strobl, C., and Zaefferer, D. (2009). Are Tims Hot and Toms not? Probing the effect of sound symbolism on perception of facial attractiveness. Presented at the 31th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, July 27 to August 1, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Perfors, A. (2004). What's in a Name? The effect of sound symbolism on perception of facial attractiveness. Presented at the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, August 5-7, Chicago, USA.

See Also

paircomp

Examples

data("Firstnames", package = "psychotree")
summary(Firstnames$preference)
covariates(Firstnames$preference)