Integrating Text Mining and Hermeneutic Analysis: The Case of International Volunteering Biographies

The biographical interview is a classic research tool widely used to collect information on the experience and worldviews of the interviewee. This chapter describes a methodological path for analyzing interviews, based on a mixed approach, that integrates text analysis statistical techniques with hermeneutic analysis in order to facilitate the work of the researcher and offer a synthetic, structured, and in-depth view of the information collected. The procedure involves a first phase in which the Emotional Text Mining (ETM) method is used to analyze the interviews with the aim of building a synthetic framework that returns the symbolic-cultural matrix and emerging representations from the speech of the interviewees. This procedure provides a schema that supports the subsequent hermeneutic content analysis phase, which allows to observe the most specific aspects of the narratives in connection with the theoretical model that guides the research. The procedure proceeds from a maximum level of synthesis, more easily reached through statistical analysis, to a maximum level of detail of information, thanks to the use of interpretive tools of “classical” qualitative analysis. The described method not only provides a guide that facilitates the work of the researcher but also provides a general framework that supports the process of understanding the investigated phenomenon.