The application of a multi-methodology approach to a corpus of social representations

This article presents an original multi-methodology approach to the collection and analysis of social representations of educational streams using a questionnaire survey conducted among 668 students (for the main study) in secondary education in French-speaking Belgium. Four methods of analysis are used: prototypical analysis, similarity analysis, the centrality control and thematic analysis of open questions. The different methods, their practical implementation and the tools used for data processing are presented and discussed. The combination of quantitative processing and qualitative analysis of the results proved particularly suitable in the context of our approach. Our questionnaire enabled us to quickly and efficiently gather a corpus that was rich enough to permit the qualitative analysis of data.