PAC Analysis, and how to use it to find subjects’ implicit attitudes and mental schemes

Professor Tetsuo Naito leads a seminar teaching the powerful research tool Personal Attitude Construct, which combines qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. It is useful in achieving visualization of an individual’s inner world and structures of attitudes, analyzing shared words and their meanings, and conducting evidence-based case studies.

People acquire their own cognitive schemes about the outside world through everyday life. Since their environments and experiences are each very different, this results in a wide range of personal attitudes. Subjects who have idiosyncratic experiences may have special schemes, unconsciously. PAC Analysis makes use of free association. A researcher asks informants to estimate the similarity between association items, and make use of cluster analysis. The researcher directs subjects to describe and compare clusters, and furthers discussion consulting with antecedent studies and findings.