Abstract:

 

D. W. Green, S. J. Muncer, T. Heffernan, I. C. McManus (2003).
Eliciting and Representing the Causal Understanding of a Social Concept:
a Methodological and Statistical Comparison of Two Methods.
Papers on Social Representations, 12, pages 2.1-2.23.
[http://www.psr.jku.at/]

 

We contrast, for the first time, two existing network methods for eliciting
the causal understanding of a social psychological concept. Our exemplar
was loneliness. In the diagram method individuals draw paths in a diagram
to indicate their perceptions of how different presented causal factors
interconnect both amongst themselves and to the target factor of loneliness.
They then rate the causal strength of these paths. In the grid method they
indicate the perceived strength of connection between each and every cause
and between each cause and the target factor by choosing one number on a
Likert scale. Potentially, these methods might elicit different mental, and
hence aggregated, representations of the causes of loneliness because they
impose different task demands. We analysed the data from each method in
two different ways (factor analysis and inductive eliminative analysis) that
have previously been associated with just one method. Factor analysis of the
data from the diagram method indicated that different individual diagrams
derived from a single common representation. Data from the grid method
showed the same outcome when we controlled for response artefacts. Both
methods also revealed similar but sparser representations using inductive
eliminative analysis. We make certain methodological suggestions in the
light of our data and consider theoretically the relationship between lay
explanation research and research on social representations.