Shamsun Nahar

Graduation Semester and Year

2014

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Social Work

Department

Social Work

First Advisor

Vijayan K Pillai

Abstract

Theory of social development is composed of an amalgam of several interrelated and independent theories, such as representational, explanatory, and normative theories. The objective of this study is to contribute to the representational theories of social development by examining the contextual variations that characterize the discourse of development in published scholarly journals. Applying the text analysis method in all abstracts (N=707) of the journal of Social Development Issues (SDI), which is one of the prominent international journals where social development is analyzed from international and interdisciplinary perspectives, this study explores the associated terms of social development, their frequency, and terms which are or are not con-centered to the terms of "social" or "development". The top five most frequent concepts are "social", "development", "work", "community", and "woman" which have frequencies of 2170, 1680, 490, 475, and 398 respectively. The terms strongly associated with "social" and "development" are "policy", "support", "analyze", "child", "concept", "approach", "culture", "context", "political", "conflict", and "impact". All the associated terms closely related to social development focus on various types of interventions, for example, psychological, feminist, communitarian, ecological, individualist-enterprise, and institutional. Results of this study manifest a remarkable diversity of the terms in social development that can help future researchers create conceptual images of social development theory and a scale to measure social development in a particular place.

Disciplines

Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social Work

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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