Abstract
This issue of the BMS includes two research articles, one in French and one in English, and four ongoing research notes, three in English and one in French. The first research article in French, “Uses of Lexicometry and Sociological Interpretation”, by Marc Glady and François Leimdorfer, takes stock on the use and experiences with text analysis software, and also on data collection procedures and interpretations of results.
The second research article in English, “Who is Willing to Answer Open-ended Questions on the Meaning of Left and Right?”, by Cornelia Zuell and Evi Scholz, investigates the influence in Germany of respondents’ personality traits, cognitive abilities and socialization, motivation, and left-right self-placement when answering these open-ended questions.
The first research note in English, “What is a Case, and What is a Case Study?”, by Hervé Dumez, addresses the three fundamental issues one must tackle when doing a case study: What is my case a case of? What is the stuff that my case is made of? What can my case do? (or what do cases do?).
The second research note in English, “Allowing for Social Desirability in Reception Studies - The Case of Self-help Book Readers”, by Nicolas Marquis, involves fifty-five qualitative interviews, and examines (a) how social desirability is manifested in these qualitative interviews, (b) what may be its heuristic relevance for research, and (c) the risks that it carries for the data’s validity.
The third research note in French, “The Social, Linguistic and Climatic Frameworks of a Dietary Survey in Dakar - Adaptation of a Researcher in her Field”, by Julie Leport, looks at how a Western female researcher, and French in particular, could manage the contextual constraints of working in Dakar, an African city open to the world and symbolically charged with its colonial history?
The fourth research note in English, “Circumventing Nonresponse - Upgrading Traditional Company Survey Data with Unobtrusive Data from Company Web Sites”, by Karsten Boye Rasmussen and Heiko Thimm, improves survey data with data obtained by a novel unobtrusive method: observation of company Web sites for functional items that are combined into an index for general Web site quality which exhibited a positive significant correlation with the use of information technology.