Data archive of "Cultural Framing of Giftedness in US Fiction"

There is a more recent version of this item available.

Item type:	Dataset
Open Access Type:	No Open Access
Date:	1 March 2024
Institutions:	Human Sciences > Institut für Bildungswissenschaft > Lehrstuhl für Schulpädagogik (Prof. Dr. Heidrun Stöger)
Keywords:	giftedness; gifted education; quantitative text analysis; US fiction; cultural products
Dewey Decimal Classification:	300 Social sciences > 370 Education
Status:	Unpublished
Refereed:	No, this version has not been refereed yet (as with preprints)
Created at the University of Regensburg:	Partially
Item ID:	55543

Abstract

A perennial topic of research on giftedness has been individuals’ perceptions of and attitudes towards giftedness, the gifted, and gifted education. Although giftedness is a culturally constructed concept, most examination of the term’s meanings and implications has used reactive measures (i.e., surveys) to tap respondents’ giftedness-related perceptions and attitudes within the context of ...

Abstract

A perennial topic of research on giftedness has been individuals’ perceptions of and attitudes towards giftedness, the gifted, and gifted education. Although giftedness is a culturally constructed concept, most examination of the term’s meanings and implications has used reactive measures (i.e., surveys) to tap respondents’ giftedness-related perceptions and attitudes within the context of formal education. To provide a better understanding of the cultural meanings associated with giftedness—the term’s cultural framing—we investigated the depiction of giftedness within a professional cultural product removed from education, namely, a large corpus of US fiction. We examined patterns of word usage in the vicinity of the term gift*, when used in the dictionary senses related to giftedness, in a large corpus of US fiction of recent decades, consisting of 485,179 text samples and 1,002,889,754 word tokens. Via inductive methods of quantitative text analysis, we explored themes occurring in the vicinity of gift*; and with an existing lookup dictionary, we assessed deductively the overall emotional valance of the writing near gift*. Our investigation revealed ways in which the literary exploration of giftedness coheres with and distinguishes itself from the outlooks on giftedness noted for survey-based research in education settings. In fictional texts, giftedness evinces special associations with humanities domains and beauty and, on balance, correlates positively with emotionally positive words.

Details

Available versions of this item

Export bibliographical data

Abstract

Abstract

Download Statistics

Downloads

More literature (via CORE)

University Library