Relative Frequency Analysis to Assess Communication Feedback in a Malfunction-Coding Scheme

Samples of data generated by the coding scheme now being used by the military to collect statistics on equipment malfunction were analyzed by psycholinguistic means. Frequency-to-rank distributions plotted on logarithmic coordinates were compared with Zipf's generalization and were found to be markedly aberrant. It is deemed likely that this reflects a lack of sufficient feedback from the users of malfunction data to those who report the data and to those who are responsible for the design of the coding scheme.