Facet Theory And The Mapping Sentence

How do we think about the worlds we live in? The formation of categories of events and objects seems to be a fundamental orientation procedure. Facet theory and its main tool, the mapping sentence, deal with categories of behavior and experience, their interrelationship, and their unification as our worldviews. In this book Hackett reviews philosophical writing along with neuroscientific research and information form other disciplines to provide a context for facet theory and the qualitative developments in this approach. With a variety of examples, the author proposes mapping sentences as a new way of understanding and defining complex behavior.

This book is the second edition of Facet Theory and the Mapping Sentence: Evolving Philosophy, Use and Application (2014). It consolidates the qualitative and quantitative research positions of facet theory and delves deeper into their qualitative application in psychology, social and the behavioural sciences and in the humanities. In their traditional quantitative guise, facet theory and its mapping sentence incorporate multi-dimensional statistics. They are also a way of thinking systematically and thoroughly about the world. The book is particularly concerned with the development of the declarative mapping sentence as a tool and an approach to qualitative research. The evolution of the facet theory approach is presented along with many examples of its use in a wide variety of research domains. Since the first edition, the major advance in facet theory has been the formalization of the use of the declarative mapping sentence and this is given a prominent position in the new edition. The book will be compelling reading for students at all levels and for academics and research professionals from the humanities, social sciences and behavioural sciences.

Using facet theory and Hackett’s pioneering development of the declarative mapping sentence (DMS) as a qualitative methodology, this volume explains the process of formulating and applying the DMS to critically assess female representation in science fiction. Using a comparative approach to the development of female roles in Western science fiction films and television, the authors illustrate how the DMS is formulated and used to analyse the psychological and behavioral profiles of female characters. By maintaining the common structure of the DMS across films while adapting its content for each female role, the text demonstrates the flexibility of the DMS in providing a structure for varied research domains, enabling results to be uniformly compared, contrasted and classified. This insightful and thought-provoking volume will appeal to researchers, academics and educators interested in psychological methods and statistics, qualitative research in gender identity, and research methods more generally. Those especially interested in behavioural psychology, gender and cinema, and science fiction will also benefit from this volume.

In this Research Topic the two editors bring together a series of articles that use facet theory and allied approaches to research. Since its inception in the work of Louis Guttman in the mid twentieth century, facet theory has become an established approach within social science research. In addition, over the past 70 years a wide range of research publications have appeared operating within the theoretical and analytic rubric of facet theory and for the last two decades a biennial international conference has been held devoted to facet theory research. When using a facet theory approach, an implicit aim of the research within this framework is to bring together in an explicit manner a clear definition of the content area that is being investigated along with data analysis procedures. Integrating the explicit design of research content (for example, attitudes, values, etc) and its subsequent analysis (for example to identify the variables that are influential to respondents in relation to the specific area under investigation) allows for the construction of theory relating to the content area and for the meaningful measurement of complex research areas. The clear explication of an area of research content, is achieved through the use of a mapping sentence (MS). In a MS all of the pertinent variables (called facets) associated with the specific subject matter of the research study are specified in the form of a natural language sentence where facets (variables) are arrange to demonstrate how these theoretically relate to each other. Sub-levels of facets are defined in such a way as to capture the relationships of research variables (facets) to each other and the overall research domain. Background variables are also stated in the MS along with a specified range over which observations will be made to test the veracity of the structural hypotheses (statements regarding the proposed manner in which variables are related to the study’s content) implicit in the MS. Furthermore, by using a MS the researcher is able to select variables that appropriately address the area of content. Traditionally, facet theory has been used in quantitative research but has recently been applied to the analysis of qualitative and philosophical research which incorporates a declarative mapping sentence in such research and which is included in this Research Topic. In order to interrogate these structural hypotheses, quantitative data analysis procedures are employed, such as Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) and Partial Order Scalogram Analysis by base Coordinates (POSAC). In SSA the structure of the content area of interest (the variables that have been included in the MS) can be interrogated as observations that have been made along the specified outcome range, are represented geometrically (as partitioned regions) in a concept-space related to the specific research domain. Individual respondents may also be investigated in terms of their profile of facet related scores using POSAC. A similar approach is employed when analysing information from qualitative facet theory research, which interrogates the structural hypotheses present in the declarative mapping sentence through approaches such as content and narrative analyses. This Research Topic presents work from scholars with particular emphasis upon how the approach has developed both theoretically and in terms of its application, new areas of application, and advances in theory development.

This book acts as an introductory guide to understanding and using the mapping sentence as a tool in social science and humanities research. The book fills the need for a concise text that simply instructs how and when to use a mapping sentence and provides practical examples. Mapping sentences are a major research component and tool of facet theory. The book begins by covering the background to mapping sentence, including the philosophy and theory underpinning it. The following chapter discuss what mapping sentence is, what different kinds of mapping sentences exist, and knowing when and which to use it in a given situation. The book then moves into describing how to write a mapping sentence and how to analyse the information gained from mapping sentence research. It ends with a consideration of the future developments of mapping sentences and their applications across the social sciences and humanities, including in particular psychology, marketing, behavioural biology, art and health.

This work has the aim of making facet theory, and the approach to research which derives from it, more accessible to behavioral and social scientists than has been possible in the past. In a first section the book gives the background to the theory and associated methods of analysis, illustrating the major components of the ap proach in use. A second section then provides detailed examples of the applications of the facet approach in developmental, clinical, and environmental psychology, as well as in studies of attitudes and mental performance. The third section provides some further technical details on recent developments in the facet approach as well as a computer program listing. The facet approach to social and behavioral research can be traced at least to the late 1940s (as discussed by Gratch, 1973) and the logical principles on which it is based have clear roots in Descartes' algebra and Fisher's experimental designs.

Using detailed examples, the authors introduce readers to the use of facet theory as a method for integrating content design with data analysis. They show how facet theory provides a strategy for conceptualizing a study, for formulating the study's variables in terms of its purposes, for systematic sampling of the variables and for formulating hypotheses. The first part of the book introduces mapping with specific emphasis on mapping sentences. Part Two explores procedures for processing multivariate data. In conclusion there is a discussion of the nature of scientific enquiry and the difference between research questions and observational questions.

In this book, Hackett introduces the traditional usage of the mapping sentence within quantitative research, reviews its philosophical underpinnings, and proposes the "declarative mapping sentence" as an instrument and approach to qualitative scholarship. With a helpful glossary and a range of illustrative tables, Hackett takes the reader through a straightforward introduction to mapping sentences and their construction, before discussing declarative mapping sentences and possible future research directions. This innovative direction for social research provides a flexible structure for research domain, and it allows qualitative research results to be uniformly sorted. Declarative Mapping Sentences in Qualitative Research will be essential reading for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of qualitative psychology and psychological methods, as well as philosophical psychology and social science research methods.