Is the educational culture in Italian Universities effective? A case study

The paper explores the professors and students’ representation of professional training in Clinical Psychology in the faculty of Medicine and Psychology of the Sapienza University of Rome in order to understand whether the educational context supports students in developing their ability to enter the job market. To this aim, an Emotional Text Mining of the interviews of 30 students and 17 teachers of the Clinical Psychology Master of Science was performed. Both corpora underwent the analysis procedure performed with T-Lab, i.e. a cluster analysis with a bisecting k-means algorithm followed by a correspondence analysis on the keyword per cluster matrix, and the results were compared. The results show 4 clusters and 3 factors for each corpus, highlighting a relationship between student and professor representations. Both of them split the training process, distinguishing the educational process from the professional one. The emotional text mining of the interviews turned out to be an enlightening tool letting their latent dimensions emerge, setting the process and outcome of the academic training, and it proved to be very useful for educational purposes.