Educational Culture and Job Market: A Text Mining Approach

Abstract The paper explores teachers and students’ training culture in clinical psychology in an Italian university in order to understand whether the educational context support the development of useful professional skills support the access of the newly graduated psychologists into the job market. To this aim, students and teachers’ interview transcriptions (n = 47) were collected into two corpora. Both corpora underwent Emotional Text Mining (ETM), which is a text mining procedure allowing for the identification of the social mental functioning (culture) setting people’s behaviors, sensations, expectation, attitudes, and communication. The results show 4 clusters and 3 factors for each corpus highlighting similarity in the representation of the training culture between student and teachers. The education and the professional training are perceived as two different processes with different goals. The text mining procedure turned out to be an enlightening tool to explore the university training culture: The research results were presented to the Master Coordinator who decided to plan a group activity for the students aiming to improve the educational process.