De Quoi Parlent Les Sociologues Reunis En Congres? Elements De Complementarite Entre Une Analyse Lexicale Ouverte Et Le Cumul De Variables Fermees

Abstract

“What Do Sociologists Talk About When Meeting in Conference?” Complementary Aspects of an Open Lexical Analysis and an Accumulation of Closed Variables: The first congress of the AFS was an occasion to provide a synthesis of the subjects of conversation current in French sociology, and we will attempt to analyze this vocabulary and its frequencies. This article confronts this first analysis with a more quantified one, based on the distance from the means, to find how the two approaches can be combined. The lexical analysis, with the Alceste program, stresses the co-occurence frequencies when words appear together in an abstract. The most frequent co-occurences are found in the class “society-inequality”, and the class “theory-authors”. Calculating the percentage difference from the means (program Trideux) stresses the differences, and puts into comparable position similar differences. In this case, the words that differ the least from the means will be those used the most by sociologists and are found in the classes “method” and “public policy”. If the authors are introduced into the analysis with variables for sex, institutional origin and location, and are associated with the words they use, we can combine the two methods and still conserve the families of words and those words which are the most significant, while cross-tabulating them with accumulated individual characteristics. The most discriminating variable is thus sex, with a concentration of women in the family “society-inequality”, and a concentration of men in the family “theory-authors”. The class on which there is the most agreement between the two methods is not mentioned individually in either method. It is the class “work-company”.