Abstract
The basic goal of quantitative ethnography (QE) is to use statistics to warrant theoretical saturation. In QE studies that use epistemic network analysis (ENA), statistical comparisons between two or more samples are often used as warrants. However, no standard quantitative techniques have been developed to provide warrants absent of differences between samples—e.g., for the data overall or for particular individuals in the data. In this paper, I introduce the expected value test (EVT), a technique for finding statistical warrants for single samples in the context of ENA-based QE analyses. Building on the concepts of agreement due to chance and randomization, the EVT generates a distribution of networks whose edge weights approximate the expected value of the edge weights due to chance. Using these distributions affords tests of statistical significance been observed networks and chance-based networks. These tests provide warrants that connections observed qualitatively and measured by ENA are theoretically saturated.
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Notes
- 1.
Crucially, though less important to the arguments in this paper, researchers also close the interpretive loop—that is, they judge whether their qualitative interpretations align with the quantitative results.
- 2.
Another way in which Cohen’s kappa is meaningful is the extent to which it generalizes, which is addressed by Shaffer’s rho.
- 3.
In the coded data examined by Csanadi and colleagues, each line could be coded for only one code, therefore this issue did not apply to their data. However, in other contexts, multiple codes may be assigned to the same line.
- 4.
Typically, ENA also performs a dimensional reduction on the collection of normalized and centered networks via singular value decomposition. However, the analysis presented here focused on the complete networks rather than their projections in a low dimensional space.
- 5.
In this sense, the EVT is essentially an empirical version of Hoetelling’s T test. However, for that test, the squared Mahalanobis distance is used in place of the Euclidean distance and a normal distribution is assumed.
- 6.
Because a dimensional reduction was not used to project the networks in a lowdimensional space, I have positioned the nodes of these networks in a circle to simplify their presentation.
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Swiecki, Z. (2022). The Expected Value Test: A New Statistical Warrant for Theoretical Saturation. In: Wasson, B., Zörgő, S. (eds) Advances in Quantitative Ethnography. ICQE 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1522. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93859-8_4
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