Text Analysis for the Social Sciences

<p>This book provides descriptions and illustrations of cutting-edge text analysis methods for communication and marketing research; cultural historical-comparative and event analysis; curriculum evaluation; psychological diagnosis; language development research; and for any research in which statistical inferences are drawn from samples of texts. Although the book is accessible to readers having no experience with content analysis the text analysis expert will find substantial new material in its pages. In particular this collection describes developments in semantic and network text analysis methodologies that heretofore have been accessible only among a smattering of methodology journals. <br><br> The book's international and cross-disciplinary content illustrates the breadth of quantitative text analysis applications. These applications demonstrate the methods' utility for international research as well as for practitioners from the fields of sociology political science journalism/communication computer science marketing education and English. This is an ecumenical collection that contains applications not only of the most recent semantic and network text analysis methods but also of the more traditional thematic method of text analysis. In fact it is originally with this volume that these two relational approaches to text analysis are defined and contrasted with more traditional thematic text analysis methods. The emphasis here is on <i>application.</i> The book's chapters provide guidance regarding the sorts of inferences that each method affords and up-to-date descriptions of the human and technological resources required to apply the methods. Its purpose is as a resource for making quantitative text analysis methods more accessible to social science researchers.</p>