A COMPUTER CONTENT-ANALYSIS APPROACH TO MEASURING SOCIAL DISTANCE IN RESIDENTIAL ORGANIZATIONS FOR OLDER-PEOPLE

Computer content analysis provides another approach to measuring diffe rential aspects of social structure (positions and perspectives), as e vident in language. Using verbatim transcripts of interviews with occu pants of positions in nursing homes talking about their organizational situation, Minnesota Contextual Content Analysis (MCCA-PC) analyzes t he meaning in these texts and computes a language-based measurement of social distance as a function of differences between perspectives, fa cilitating an examination of social distance with other organizational and personal outcomes. Correlates of distance between roles across nu rsing homes suggest consequences for organizational structure and mean ings residents express about their experience. Content scores permit i dentification of each respondent with a particular nursing home, a mea surable aspect of organizational culture. This methodology is compared to techniques in information retrieval for characterizing documents b y semantic vectors. Semantic analysis of MCCA categories using WordNet reveals semantic domains, whose refinement may better characterize id entified differences.