Teaching
Tony Coxon used an ESDS Qualidata collection (now part of the UK Data Service), Neighbourhood Boundaries, Social Disorganisation and Social Exclusion, to teach a course on the ‘Computer-aided analysis of documents and texts’ for the University of Edinburgh Graduate School in Social and Political Studies.
Neighbourhood Boundaries, Social Disorganisation and Social Exclusion undertook a comparative analysis of UK neighbourhood crime policies in Edinburgh and Glasgow. It examined the responses to crime and disorder within both affluent and deprived neighbourhoods, considered informal means of social control, and evaluated the extent to which defensive or exclusive strategies contribute to the social and spatial exclusion of deprived neighbourhoods.
This course was aimed at social science researchers who wish to generate and/or analyse textual data. Students were assumed to have some familiarity with word-processing and/or packages such as Nudist or NVivo. The course outline and the course were both web-assisted.
To simplify for students the files selected for use were reduced to text format, and the class mainly concentrated on one single interview with a Community Police Officer.
This was used in the first part of the course to illustrate ‘bottom-up analysis’ using word and word-sense lists, together with Key Word In Context (KWIC) as a means of building themes and categories for analysis. Co-occurrence frequencies were calculated between these themes using HAMLET II and scaling/cluster analysis. In the second part of the course, ‘top-down’ analysis used General Inquirer to define and calibrate the themes of the first part, and to analyse the semantic profiles of some files. Students doing the course then went on to use the unanalysed files in their assessment projects.
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