Towards a taxonomy of meaning making: A critical latent content analysis of peer–reviewed publications in adult education

A recent manifest content analysis of manuscripts in leading U.S. adult education journals found a discrepancy between how often academics used meaning making language and how often practitioners and policy makers did. It was suggested this was due to the language being unhelpful to practitioner and policy makers’ work. A follow up latent content analysis of a subset of this sample was conducted to test this hypothesis and reveal authors’ intentions and meanings. Findings showed inconsistencies and contradictions in usage and no collective sense of what meaning making terms mean. A functional taxonomy of meaning construction was then proposed to broaden the language's usefulness among practitioners and further the possibilities of interdisciplinary research with scientific fields.