ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how to locate and empirically describe each concept’s position in a mental model and how to construct composite empirical descriptions of the entire mental model. Mental models can be abstracted from texts as a network of relations between concepts. A network-based procedure for analyzing conceptual networks is presented. The procedure enables the researcher to characterize the structure of the conceptual network along a series of dimensions. The proposed procedure for analyzing conceptual networks allows the researcher to locate the position of each concept in the conceptual network, classify concepts according to a taxonomy, and make predictions about action on the basis of the distribution of concepts in this taxonomy. Concepts in the socioconceptual network were classified into their requisite category using the following cutoffs. A density greater than or equal to 24 was considered high, a conductivity greater than or equal to 572 was considered high, and an intensity greater than 0.96 was considered high.
