NOTICE: The following example has been realized by using an old version of T-LAB (3.0). The latest version (T-LAB 7.0) includes new tools and a new charting system. Click here to find out more. T-LAB functions used in this short example are those highlighted in red in the image on the right. For futher information about T-LAB functions click here. To consult more samples click here. To download the demo click here.

The Word Associations technique has a long tradition and it is used in various fields of research.

In general, its application is rather simple: some "stimulus words", one to the time, are submitted to a collection of people (the "subjects") , therefore it is asked to say (or to write) the first words that - "freely" - comes to mind.

In the reported case, to the pupils of middle school they have been proposed the following stimulus words: family, school, job, money.

The obtained answers have been transcribed and collected in a file with the following format (NB: the listed associations are those relative to "school")

.

Preparing the corpus for the analysis, we have inserted to the beginning of every answer the corresponding stimulus word.
This operation, realized by means of a word processor (search/replace), has been used to reconstruct the "associative chains" in their integrity.

Subsequently we have imported the file by T-LAB and, without further operations, we have used the Associations function.
NB: this function elaborates Co-occurrence measures of the words to the inside of the same elementary contexts (in this case,
the single answers of the pupils); therefore the measures are transformed in diagrams.

In the graphs, the selected words are placed in the center; the others are distributed around it, each at distance proportional to its degree of association: the shorter the distance, the greater the degree of association. The significant relationships are therefore one-to-one, to the central word and to each of the others.
Follow the diagrams and the tables relative to the four words stimulus. The values of the tables are those of the used measure: the cosine coefficient.