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The principal purpose of this study was to determine the low inference constituents of literary response. Data were obtained from 166 college undergraduates enrolled in nine introductory literature courses. A stimulus condition consisting of six dissimilar short stories and poems was devised. After reading each literary work, subjects were asked to complete a modified version of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Response Preference Measure. To determine empirically the constituents of literary response, subjects' ratings for each item for all six forms of the Response Preference Measure were jointly subjected to the principal axis method of common factor analysis. Subsequent to varimax rotation, the following four factors were interpreted and labeled: personal statement, descriptive response, interpretive response, and evaluative response.
Zaharias et al. (Sat,) studied this question.