Integrating text mining and hermeneutic analy-sis: the case of international volunteering biog-raphies

The biographical interview is a classic research tool widely used to collect infor-mation on the experience and worldviews of the interviewee. This article describes a methodological path for analyzing interviews, based on a mixed approach, that integrates text analysis statistical techniques with hermeneutic analysis in order to facilitate the work of the researcher and offer a synthetic, structured, and in-depth view of the information collected. The procedure involves a first phase in which the Emotional Text Mining (ETM) method is used to analyze the interviews with the aim of building a synthetic framework that returns the symbolic-cultural ma-trix and emerging representations from the speech of the interviewees. This proce-dure provides a schema that supports the subsequent hermeneutic content analysis phase, which allows to observe the most specific aspects of the narratives in con-nection with the theoretical model that guides the research. The procedure proceeds from a maximum level of synthesis, more easily reached through statistical analy-sis, to a maximum level of detail of information, thanks to the use of interpretive tools of "classical" qualitative analysis. The described method not only provides a guide that facilitates the work of the researcher, but also provides a general frame-work that supports the process of understanding the investigated phenomenon.