Scientists’ spirituality in scientists’ words. Assessing and enriching the results of a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews by means of quantitative approaches

Abstract

The present study proposes an analysis process to assess and enrich the results of a previous qualitative study on science and spirituality (Sbalchiero in Scienza e spiritualita: Ruoli e percezioni della ricerca nel mondo contemporaneo, 2012; Sbalchiero in Testing Pluralism: Globalizing Belief, 2013) by means of quantitative methods. Moving from qualitative findings, that envisaged a set of in-depth interviews with 24 Italian scientists, statistical analyses of textual data are applied on the same interviews in order to compare and contrast results and evaluate the opportunity of integrating different approaches. This review of qualitative results resorts to methods for classification of context units (Reinert in Les Cahiers de l’Analyse des Donnees 8:187–198, 1983), text clustering (Berry in Survey of Text Mining. Clustering, Classification, and Retrieval, 2004) and lexical correspondence analysis (Lebart et al. in Exploring textual data, 1998) in a general framework of content analysis and “lexical worlds” exploration (Reinert in Langage Societe, 1993), i.e. the identification of main topics and words used by Italian scientists to talk about the relationship among science, religion, spirituality. Results confirm the potentialities of mixed method approaches and shed light on how quantitative methods might become useful when available interviews increase in number and size.