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From Strange to Normal: Computational Approaches to Examining Immigrant Incorporation Through Shifts in the Mainstream
Stockholm University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0338-3273
University of Connecticut, USA.
University of Connecticut, USA.
Stockholm University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences.
2022 (English)In: Sociological Methods & Research, ISSN 0049-1241, E-ISSN 1552-8294, Vol. 51, no 4, p. 1540-1579Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This article presents a computational approach to examining immigrant incorporation through shifts in the social “mainstream.” Analyzing a historical corpus of American etiquette books, texts from 1922–2017 describing social norms, we identify mainstream shifts related to long-standing groups which once were and may currently still be seen as immigrant outsiders in the United States: Catholic, Chinese, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Mexican, and Muslim groups. The analysis takes a computational grounded theory approach, combining qualitative readings and computational text analyses. Using word embeddings, we operationalize the chosen groups as focal group concepts. We extract sections of text that are salient to the focal group concepts to create group-specific text corpora. Two computational approaches make it possible to examine mainstream shifts in these corpora. First, we use sentiment analysis to observe the positive sentiment in each corpus and its change over time. Second, we observe changes in each corpus's position on a semantic dimension represented by the poles of “strange” and “normal.” The results indicate mainstream shifts through increases in positive sentiment and movement from strange to normal over time for most of the group-specific corpora. These research techniques can be adapted to other studies of social sentiment and symbolic inclusion.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2022. Vol. 51, no 4, p. 1540-1579
Keywords [en]
word embeddings, sentiment analysis, immigrant incorporation, manners, etiquette
National Category
Sociology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-211947DOI: 10.1177/00491241221122596ISI: 000868408800001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85138785487OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-211947DiVA, id: diva2:1714364
Available from: 2022-11-29 Created: 2022-11-29 Last updated: 2022-12-12Bibliographically approved

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Voyer, Andrea

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CiteExportLink to record
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Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
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  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
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