Abstract
Sociosemantic analysis in social psicology: a conceptual proposal and a technique for its implemen tation. The aim of "Sociosemantic Analysis" is to reveal, in an intrinsically interconnected way, the communication structure of a g iven social group and the semantic content of that structure. As its name suggests, "Socio-semantics" interweaves in a single conceptual frame the two fundamental dimensions of human communication: people (the who aspect of communication) and content (the what aspect of communication). From a socio-semantic point of view individuals communicate semantically through concepts, and concepts "communicate" socially through individuals. Individuals are (socio-) semantically connected (they are potentially interacting units) through the concepts that they possess in common; and concepts are socio (-semantically) connected through the individuals who share them. The connectivities between concepts or individuals can be processed through nonmetric multidimensional scaling which generates sociosemantic plots which reveal the social and semantic structure of the social group in question. The paper shows the application of sociosemantic analysis to the study of one hundred adolescents selfperception patterns.
