Cultural framing of giftedness in recent US fictional texts

Abstract

A perennial topic of research on giftedness has been individuals’ perceptions of and attitudes towards giftedness, the gifted, and gifted education. Although giftedness is a culturally constructed concept, most examination of the term’s meanings and implications has used reactive measures (i.e., surveys) to tap respondents’ giftedness-related perceptions and attitudes within the context of formal education. To provide a better understanding of the cultural meanings associated with giftedness—the term’s cultural framing—we investigated the depiction of giftedness within a professional cultural product removed from education, namely, a large corpus of US fictional texts. We examined patterns of word usage in the vicinity of the term gift*, when used in the dictionary senses related to giftedness, in a large corpus of US fictional texts of recent decades, consisting of 485,179 text samples and 1,002,889,754 word tokens. Via inductive methods of quantitative text analysis, we explored themes occurring in the vicinity of gift*; and with an existing lookup dictionary, we assessed deductively the overall emotional valance of the writing near gift*. Our investigation revealed ways in which the literary exploration of giftedness coheres with and distinguishes itself from the outlooks on giftedness noted for survey-based research in education settings. In fictional texts, giftedness evinces special associations with humanities domains and beauty and, on balance, correlates positively with emotionally positive words.