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- Title
Free associations and social representations: some reflections on rank-frequency and importance-frequency methods.
- Authors
Dany, Lionel; Urdapilleta, Isabel; Lo Monaco, Grégory
- Abstract
Free association is a technique frequently used for the collection of social representations, notably in the structural approach. Two methods are commonly used for analysing the associations produced. The rank-frequency method, which cross-tabulates the frequency of an item with its appearance ranking; the importance-frequency method (or ranked associations), which replaces the appearance ranking criterion with an importance ranking criterion which consists in ranking a posteriori the elements named. We carried out a comparative analysis of these two methods based on a collection of free association corpora concerning the representations of cancer ( $$N = 55$$ ), palliative care ( $$N = 259$$ ) and academic success ( $$N = 138$$ ). The results indicate that many subjects (82.96 %) make changes to the spontaneously produced representation during the ranking of elements. These modifications directly affect the representational fields and the organisation of the representation. The a posteriori ranking of the representational elements allows the available knowledge on the object of representation to be re-contextualised and the accent to be placed on the functional aspect of the social element which is specific to social representations and not to prototypes.
- Subjects
FREE association (Psychology); COLLECTIVE representation; SOCIAL structure; COMPARATIVE studies; ACADEMIC achievement; PALLIATIVE treatment
- Publication
Quality & Quantity, 2015, Vol 49, Issue 2, p489
- ISSN
0033-5177
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11135-014-0005-z