Guidelines for the construction of valid Category Systems

Abstract

The construction of category systems is a fundamentally intuitive task which depends on the skill of the person building them. The literature has paid more attention to the end result than on how to get there. To redress this situation, this article offers a set of construction guidelines. They are the result of the free development and adaptation of publications in various fields of social sciences and methodology, combined with the author’s experience in the preparation and assessment of his own and others’ category systems. The guidelines recommend that the person constructing the system should recover known concepts and data, and offer procedures for searching and generating those that are required and how to use all this material, bearing in mind the validity criteria that have to be met. Also, there are included two useful instruments: A form for expressing the systems and a check-list for their validity.