State of the art of social representations theory in Asia: An empirical meta-theoretical analysis

• Published in: Journal of Pacific Rim psychology Vol. 13
• Main Authors: de Rosa, Annamaria Silvana, Gherman, Mihaela-Alexandra
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 2019
• Subjects: social representations theory; meta-theoretical analysis; social psychology; Asian geocultural context
• ISSN: 1834-4909; 1834-4909
• DOI: 10.1017/prp.2019.1

Part of a larger research project aimed at performing the meta-theoretical analysis of the worldwide literature published on social representations theory (SRT), this article explores the state of art of the theory in the geocultural context of Asia, spatially and temporally, as well as from a conceptual, disciplinary, theoretical, empirical and thematic point of view. The Grid for MetaTheoretical Analysis was used on 194 sources, extracted from the So.Re.Com “A.S. de Rosa”@-library. Multi-step strategies of data analyses offer a diversified picture of findings: (a) descriptive statistics and geomapping with Tableau Desktop the bibliometric impact country by country; (b) structural multidimensional view of significant intersections between “meta-data” performing hierarchical clustering on the top of the multiple correspondence analysis. The three clusters detected reveal a shift from a more generic and applied tradition of research on SRT in 2002–2011 to a more theoretically oriented empirical research trend starting from 2011, identifying the scientific production anchored into different Asian regions (Indonesia, China and Israel) and mainly differentiated by the methodology employed. Results revealed that SRT was adopted due to its epistemological and empirical compatibilities with the purpose of creating an original Asian social psychology, interested in indigenous social phenomena specific to cultural backgrounds.