Dissertation Information for Marilyn Sue Sahli NAME: - Marilyn Sue Sahli
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science
SCHOOL:
- Case Western Reserve University (USA) (1981)
ADVISORS: - Phyllis A. Richmond
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - [Indecipherable1] - Sarah Scott Gibson - Raymond Nelson
MPACT Status: Complete - Except Indecipherables
Title: Terminology of the social sciences: the term "cognitive processes" in the thesauri of two discipline-based information systems
Abstract: The characteristics of the terminology of the social sciences are of interest to both social scientists and documentalists. Analysis of representative writings from both fields reveals that, while the concern of social scientists is with the identification of the underlying causes of terminological problems, documentalists are concerned primarily with methods of accommodating an imprecise and unstable terminology in the classification schemes and indexing languages designed for organizing the literature of the social sciences.
An examination of writings which describe the theoretical background of methods for vocabulary control in information retrieval systems centers on those devices which provide a form of definition for terms whose meanings might otherwise be ambiguous. Analysis of current methods for achieving compatibility or convertibility between two or more indexing languages draws attention to the need for a switching language to establish equivalency between concepts, not terms, and raises the possibility that the ambiguity of a term may go unrecognized.
In order to examine the assumption of the conceptual equivalency of identical terms in the indexing languages of related subject fields, a specific case in which a single term appears to have different meanings in the information systems for the two social science disciplines is examined.
Hierarchical charts constructed to display the arrays under the term "cognitive processes" in the ERIC Thesaurus and the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms demonstrated that the term appears in different hierarchical frameworks in the two indexing languages. Three explanations were proposed to account for the observed differences.
The first explanation, that "cognitive processes" represents different concepts to educationists and psychologists, was rejected by examination of formal definitions. A comparision of textbooks on cognitive processes for the two disciplines did not provide evidence to support the second explanation, that educationists and psychologists view the concept within different conceptual frameworks. The third explanation, that the two hierarchies represent research interests in the two fields, was rejected following an investigation of current journal articles.
The results suggest the need for further study of single terms in social science vocabularies and for additional comparisons of the hierarchies generated by identical terms in different thesauri.
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MPACT Scores for Marilyn Sue Sahli A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-04-09 14:02:35
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