title: Building the boundaries of a science: First representations of Italian social psychology between 1875 and 1954.
abstract: The present study embraces the critical traditions of "New History" and of social representations theory articulated with the mainstream historiographical tradition of a bibliometric approach. The historical analysis deals with the early representations of Italian social psychology articulated and disseminated by some of the main Italian scientific-cultural and philosophical journals. We examined seven journals published between 1875 and 1954, and gathered 2,030 texts dealing with the various forms of social and collective psychology. We have applied a grid of content analysis whose data have been transcribed to a numerical file. At the same time, we have created a textual file containing the titles of the contributions as well as the names of the authors and scholars reviewed. The two files have been processed by SPAD-T for a correspondence analysis in which both lexical data and category variables have been considered as active variables. Through the scree-test, two factors that explain 18.90% of the variance have been singled out. Their combination has produced a factorial plan able to highlight three distinct areas differently characterized from journals and years. The results are also discussed with regard to the contextual historical frame.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology of Development and Socialization Processes, Sapienza University of Rome, Via dei Marsi, 78-00185 Rome, Italy. Gilda.Sensales@uniroma1.it
authors.forename: Gilda
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sensales
authors.forename: Alessandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Areni
authors.forename: Alessandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Del Secco
mesh_terms: D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D007558:Italy; D011593:Psychology, Social / Q000266:history*