Le rappresentazioni di "Genere" e il mondo del lavoro attraverso la comunicazione scientifica in psicologia sociale: analisi del lessico degli "Psychological Abstracts" (1976-2002).

On the one hand the research can be framed within the tradition of studies on Social Representations (SR) with a particular focus on the relationship between SR and scientific knowledge; on the other hand, it can be placed within the recent development of lexical analysis conducted on titles, abstracts or key-words of scientific articles. In our case the analysis is conducted on the entire corpus of “Psychological Abstracts”. The aim of this investigation is the exploration of the lexical-semantic structure of the representations of the “gender and the world of work” within the scientific discourse of Social Psychology. This structure was also studied as regards to possible differential aspects. The research sample is composed of 162 abstracts selected by means of an automatic research on the PsychoLIT, the electronic database of the “Psychological Abstracts”, through the following keywords: “GENDER AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND WORK”. The selected abstracts range from the year 1976 to the first semester of 2002. The structural characteristics were investigated with the ASPAR procedure of SPAD-T. The words of the abstracts, including titles, summaries, key-words, major description and classification codes, were considered as active variables. They were differentiated from each other by means of the inclusion of a specific letter in front of the lexical unit of each field (e.g. K in front of the word referring to the key-word). Data referring to, for instance, “country in which the journal was published”, “gender of the first and of the second author”, “period of publication”, were considered as illustrative variables. After a preliminary phase of “data screening” with the EQUIVALENCE procedure of the SPAD-T, words with a frequency higher than 5 were taken into consideration and the analysis was run on 13,765 words, 606 of which were different (4.4%). The analysis pointed out three factorial axes clearly different from each other. Their valence is also discussed as regards the illustrative variables and the representational process on the scientific discourse and on common sense.