Statistical and linguistic procedures were implemented to analyze a large corpus of texts written by 37 individuals with autism and 92 facilitators (without disabilities), producing written conversations by means of PCs. Such texts were compared and contrasted to identify the specific traits of the lexis of the group of individuals with autism and assess to what extent it differed from the lexis of the facilitators. The purpose of this research was to identify specific language features using statistical procedures to analyze contingency lexical tables that reported on the frequencies of words and grammatical categories in different subcorpora and among different writers. The results support the existence of lexis and distributional patterns of grammatical categories that are characteristic of the written production of individuals with autism and that are different from those of facilitators.
The present study proposes an analysis process to assess and enrich the results of a previous qualitative study on science and spirituality (Sbalchiero in Scienza e spiritualità: Ruoli e percezioni della ricerca nel\ud mondo contemporaneo, 2012; Sbalchiero in Testing Pluralism: Globalizing Belief, 2013) by means of quantitative methods. Moving from qualitative findings, that envisaged a set of in-depth interviews with 24\ud Italian scientists, statistical analyses of textual data are applied on the same interviews in order to compare and contrast results and evaluate the opportunity of integrating different approaches. This review of\ud qualitative results resorts to methods for classification of context units (Reinert in Les Cahiers de l’Analyse des Donnees 8:187–198, 1983), text clustering (Berry in Survey of Text Mining. Clustering, Classification,\ud and Retrieval, 2004) and lexical correspondence analysis (Lebart et al. in Exploring textual data, 1998) in a general framework of content analysis and “lexical worlds” exploration (Reinert in Langage Société, 1993), i.e. the identification of main topics and words used by Italian scientists to talk about the relationship among science, religion, spirituality. Results confirm the potentialities of mixed method approaches and shed light on how quantitative methods might become useful when available interviews increase in number and size
This research note focuses on some of the opportunities provided by the statistical analysis of textual data, by illustrating examples of the use of lexicon-based quantitative measures with texts within a particular context of augmentative and alternative communication. The corpus is composed of 12 essays produced by six individuals with autism and six participants without disabilities in a control group during sessions of facilitated communication. The study raises questions that can be answered thanks to the statistical methods implemented in the text analysis framework and other procedures that may be used to identify the characteristics of texts (and their writers) and compare texts (or subcorpora). The aim is to discuss strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the approach and to highlight its connections to qualitative approaches.
In recent years, the brain drain issue has gained such momentum that it has become necessary to adopt tools and methods to take a picture of a phenomenon that is, by its very nature, dynamic and changeable (Portes, 1976; Meyer, 2001; Ackers, 2005; Scott, 2015). This particular study focuses on clarifying the reasons why Italian scientists choose to look elsewhere for the best place to conduct their scientific research, and in what way their scientific experience abroad shapes the image of the Italian scientific system. A first exploratory analysis involving 83 in-depth interviews with Italian scientists (mathematicians, engineers and physicists) working in Europe was conducted based on qualitative and quantitative analytical methods, and the content emerging from these interviews was used for a systematic mapping of the situation that provided the foundations for our preparation of a second tool – a questionnaire – that was subsequently used to conduct a much more broad-based survey that involved 602 respondents. While our findings add complexity to existing theories on the brain drain and brain circulation, they also confirm the potential of highly skilled migration to improve the national development of Italian academic system
New opportunities have recently emerged in survey practice, coupled with a need to make changes, and alternative survey data collection modes such as those based on new technologies (for example, the Web and mobile phones) have become a focus of interest. Studies have considered the biases due to data collection modes and to the wording of questions in questionnaires, but they have rarely dealt with the interaction between the two phenomena. This paper presents the results of a study on the interactions between some of the best-known question-wording effects and three data collection modes: face-to-face, Web-based and SMS-based (Short Text Messaging). The results have highlighted some interesting characteristics of the various modes — innovative ones in particular — and have confirmed the existence of potential interactions between data collection modes and question-wording effects. The findings may have significant implications for the study and practice of surveys and entail that, when surveys are designed, account is taken of specific factors associated with the method used to word the questions in questionnaires
The words that occur in papers published by the journals of an old and prestigious scientific society like the American Statistical Association portray the most relevant research interests of a discipline and the recurrence of words over time show fashions, forgotten topics and new emerging subjects, that is, the history of a discipline at a glance. In this study a set of keywords occurred in the titles of papers published in the period 1888–2012 by the Journal of the American Statistical Association and its predecessors are examined over time in order to retrieve those which appeared in the past and which are today the research fields covered by Statistics, from the viewpoints of both methods and application domains. The existence of a latent temporal pattern in keywords’ occurrences is explored by means of (lexical) correspondence analysis and clusters of keywords portraying similar temporal patterns are identified by functional (textual) data analysis and model-based curve clustering. The analyses reveal a definite time dimension in topics and show that much of the History of Statistics may be gleaned by simply reading the titles of papers through an explorative correspondence analysis. However, the functional approach and model-based curve clustering turn out to be better in tracing and comparing the individual temporal evolution of keywords, despite some computational and theoretical limitations
The European Journal of Social Psychology (EJSP), as the voice of the European Association of Social Psychology, aims to promote diversity and a distinctively ‘European’, more ‘social’, social psychology (SP). However, whether and how these objectives have been accomplished over time remains controversial. This article enters this debate, tracing the history of SP as depicted by EJSP publications, via two types of lexicometric analyses of all abstracts of the Journal (1971–2016). Themes, processes, methods, and their organisation in cycles and clusters over time, were identified and analysed. Regarding diversity, findings indicate that the publications reflect several of the new theoretical proposals that emerged over the years, but do not fully reflect the variety of perspectives and methods of the discipline. It further indicates that lately the ‘social’ is predominantly present in attention to pressing social issues, albeit the processes involved in them are mostly theorised at an individualistic level. This pattern suggests the importance of keeping open the quest for epistemological and methodological diversity, and of re‐problematising what the ‘social’ in SP means. By contributing to mapping the history of SP, offering a more comprehensive and reflexive view for it, the present analyses also help in forging a stronger discipline.
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