A Computer Content Analysis Approach to Measuring Social Distance in Residential Organizations for Older People

Abstract

Computer content analysis provides another approach to measuring differential aspects of social structure (positions and perspectives), as evident in language. Using verbatim transcripts of interviews with occupants of positions in nursing homes talking about their organizational situation, Minnesota Contextual Content Analysis (MCCA-PC) analyzes the meaning in these texts and computes a language-based measurement of social distance as a function of differences between perspectives, facilitating an examination of social distance with other organizational and personal outcomes. Correlates of distance between roles across nursing homes suggest consequences for organizational structure and meanings residents express about their experience. Content scores permit identification of each respondent with a particular nursing home, a measurable aspect of organizational culture. This methodology is compared to techniques in information retrieval for characterizing documents by semantic vectors. Semantic analysis of MCCA categories using WordNet reveals semantic domains, whose refinement may better characterize identified differences.

Keywords

content analysis semantic analysis computing MCCA social distance

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

CL Research. (1992). DIMAP-2 user's manual. Gaithersburg, MD: Author.

CL Research. (1997). DIMAP-3 user's manual. Manuscript in preparation.

Cleveland, C.E. , McTavish, D. , & Pirro, E.B. (1974, September 5-13). Contextual content analysis. Proceedings of the ISSC/CISS Workshop on Content Analysis in the Social Sciences, a conference sponsored by the Standing Committee on Social Science Data of the International Social Science Council, UNESCO, Centro Nazionale Universitario del Calcolo Eletronico (CUNCE), Pisa, Italy.

Cruse, D.A. (1986). Lexical semantics. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.

Kadushin, C. (1962). Social distance between client and professional . American Journal of Sociology, 67(5), 517-531.

Kidwell, I.J. , & Booth, A. (1977). Social distance and intergenerational relations . Gerontologist, 17(5), 412-420.

Krovetz, R. , & Croft, W.B. (1992). Lexical ambiguity and information retrieval. ACM Transactions on Infonnation Systems, 10(2), 115-141.

Kucera, H. , & Francis, W.N. (1967). Computerized dictionary of present-day English . Providence, RI: Brown University Press.

Liddy, E.D. , Paik, W. , & Yu, E.S. (1993). Document filtering using semantic information from a machine readable dictionary. In Proceedings of the workshop on very large corpora: Academic and industrial perspectives (pp. 20-29). Columbus: Ohio State University.

10.

McPherson, J.M. , & Smith- Lovin, L. (1987). Homophily in voluntary organizations: Status distance and the composition of face-to-face groups . Amencan Sociological Review, 52, 370-379.

11.

McTavish, D.G. , & Felt, D. (1987). Role distances and atmosphere in nursing homes . Sociology of Rural Life, 9(1), 3-4, 8.

12.

McTavish, D.G. , & Pirro, E. (1990). Contextual content analysis. Quality and Quantity, 24, 245-265.

13.

McTavish, D.G. , & Schrader, S.L. (1992). Residential options for rural Minnesota elderly. Sociology of Rural Life, 12, 3-4, 7-8.

14.

Miller, D.C. (1983). Handbook of research design and social measurement (4th ed., pp. 329-222). White Plains, NY: Longman.

15.

Miller, G.A. , Beckwith, R. , Fellbaum, C. , Gross, D. , Miller, K. , & Tengi, R. (1993). Five papers on WordNet (CSL Report No. 43. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory.

16.

Nida, E.A. (1975). Componential analysis of meaning. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton.

17.

Reiss, A.J., Jr. (1961). Occupations and social status. New York: Free Press.