Theory and Method for the Analysis of Social Representations

Since its early conceptualization, the Social Representations Theory (SRT) has illuminated the mechanisms through which the media communication contributes in shaping the social thinking and transforming the varied objects of knowledge that characterize the flowing of everyday life into familiar ideas and concepts. The present chapter intends to enlarge the comprehension of the role of the media in the genesis, diffusion, and transformation of the social representations of compound issues that are relevant in the social arena. Precisely, it aims to shed light on the dynamic structures that connect the representational forms produced by the media discourses so as generating coherent and meaningful patterns of thoughts and cognitions. This main aim is pursued at a twofold level, both theories and methods. With concern to the former level, a theoretical bridge connects the notion of social representations and the concept of symbolic universes. Precisely, social representations are described as concrete “instantiations” of the abstract and generalized symbolic universes while the media discourses are presented as (one of) the communicative contexts into which important issues are represented in recursive patterns of meaning-making, e.g. social representations. At the same time, we contribute to the literature on the methodology to study social representations applying a combination of text mining techniques and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to bridge textual and survey data.