Data and Methods

Abstract

The chapter summarizes the quantitative methods and delineates the process developed to analyze in the following chapters of Part II and Part III of the book (a) the constitutive goods, (b) the internalized code orientations, (c) the patterned orders of ethics, (d) the ethics of social interaction, and (e) the construction of the ‘democratic self’, as well as to depict visually the ‘semantic map’ of the Greek civil society. The method that was used throughout the analysis is the ‘Geometric Data Analysis’ (Analyse des données). It refers to a group of techniques that aim to visualize, classify, and interpret the data. This includes methods such as Correspondence Analysis (simple and multiple), Principal Component Analysis, Canonical Correlation Analysis, Multidimensional Scaling, and Multiple Factor Analysis. The primary goal of Geometric Data Analysis methods is to transform a table of numerical information into a graphical display so as to reveal the underlying latent structure in the data, removing redundant information. This process makes it easier to interpret structures and patterns in the data.