Interviews, Language Concreteness, and The Measurement of Internal Dispositions

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 1. Advances in Cultural Analysis

Abstract

What information about culture can sociologists glean from interview data, and how can it be leveraged to study behavior? This question has provoked insightful debates in recent years and has led to productive theoretical and methodological developments (Lamont and Swidler 2014; Martin 2010; McDonnell 2014; Pugh 2013; Vaisey 2014). In this paper I develop a novel approach to the cultural analysis of interview data that draws on recent developments in psycholinguistics and automated text analysis. Using linked survey and interview data from two waves of the National Survey of Youth and Religion, I find that the concreteness with which adolescents discuss religious topics is associated with their religious attendance when they are young adults. More generally, my findings suggest that in certain cases, the concreteness with which a person discusses a particular topic may be an indicator of subjective states that are predictive of behavior. The theoretical implication is that interview methods, analyzed quantitatively, may provide direct access to more forms of personal culture than previously believed, including internal dispositions toward certain behaviors.

Author

• Michael Lee Wood, Brigham Young University