Free associations and social representations: some reflections on rank-frequency and importance-frequency methods

• Published in: Quality & quantity Vol. 49; no. 2; pp. 489 - 507
• Main Authors: Dany, Lionel, Urdapilleta, Isabel, Lo Monaco, Grégory
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.03.2015; Springer; Springer Nature B.V; Springer Verlag
• Subjects: Academic Achievement; Analysis; Associations; Cancer; Collective memory; Collective representation; Comparative Analysis; Free association; Frequency; Humanities and Social Sciences; Knowledge; Methodology of the Social Sciences; Methods; Organization; Palliative Care; Palliative treatment; Prototypes; Psychological aspects; Psychology; Quality of life; Ratings & rankings; Semantics; Social representations; Social Sciences; Studies; Free associations; Rank-frequency method; Importance frequency method; Social representations; Structural approach
• ISSN: 0033-5177; 1573-7845
• DOI: 10.1007/s11135-014-0005-z

Free association is a technique frequently used for the collection of social representations, notably in the structural approach. Two methods are commonly used for analysing the associations produced. The rank-frequency method, which cross-tabulates the frequency of an item with its appearance ranking; the importance-frequency method (or ranked associations), which replaces the appearance ranking criterion with an importance ranking criterion which consists in ranking a posteriori the elements named. We carried out a comparative analysis of these two methods based on a collection of free association corpora concerning the representations of cancer ( N = 55 ), palliative care ( N = 259 ) and academic success ( N = 138 ). The results indicate that many subjects (82.96 %) make changes to the spontaneously produced representation during the ranking of elements. These modifications directly affect the representational fields and the organisation of the representation. The a posteriori ranking of the representational elements allows the available knowledge on the object of representation to be re-contextualised and the accent to be placed on the functional aspect of the social element which is specific to social representations and not to prototypes.