Intercultural competences in multicultural education and formation communities: key concepts identified by the text analysis of focus groups

This chapter illustrates the results of the lexical and textual analysis of focus groups, with 296 participants who are members of the Institute of Consecrated Life, ecclesiastical institutions of higher education and their teachers. The focus groups provide an in-depth analysis of three key aspects of this research: a) how multiculturality and interculturality are perceived; b) how participants design training programmes and activities fostering intercultural experiences and networking; c) how to identify educational difficulties and skills needed to foster interculturality in multicultural contexts. The software used for the lexical and textual analysis is called IramuteQ. During this research, we detected specificities, extracted multiword expressions, analysed co-occurrences and identified some semantic clusters using Reinert’s classification technique. Several issues and opportunities emerged from this study, mostly stemming from the coexistence in different contexts of people with eterogeneous cultural backgrounds and multiple identity reference points. More in general, interculturality has various nuances of meaning.