2020 AGEP Conference Oral Presentation

Oral presentation at the annual Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) conference

1. Metaphor Analysis for Construct
Explication
Adrian L. Price, Heike I.M. Mahler, Christopher J. Hopwood

2. Problem Overview
●We aimed to construct and validate a self-report emptiness scale
●Subjective emptiness is a clinically significant psychiatric construct
●Fewer than 10 published empirical studies exist
●Lack of research largely due to a lack of psychometrically sound measures

3. Emptiness
Boredom

4. Problem Overview
●We aimed to construct and validate an emptiness scale
●Subjective emptiness is a clinically significant psychiatric construct
●Fewer than 10 published empirical studies
●Largely due to lack of psychometrically sound measures

5. Outcome
●We developed and validated a psychometrically sound self-report measure
○Unidimensionality
○High internal consistency
○Adequate construct validity
●But, how did we measure construct that is typically difficult to operationalize?

6. The Most Challenging Aspect of Our Research
●Emptiness is difficult to measure because it evades definition
○How do you define an absence of something?
●Similarly to other researchers, we found emptiness difficult to define
●Difficulty recruiting interview participants due to difficulty articulating
experiences

7. ●Limited affective lexicon

8. Emptiness

9. Emptiness
Void
Empty
Hollow

10. Emptiness
Void
Empty
Hollow

11. ●Limited affective lexicon
●Utility of figurative language
○Multidisciplinary exploration of emptiness (Hazell, 2003)
○Metaphor use in online message boards

12. Utility of Metaphor Analysis for Construct Definition
●Metaphors render abstract and complex subjective experiences more
accessible by using the familiar to articulate the unfamiliar (Lakoff & Johnson,
2008; Ortony, 1979)
●Three functions of metaphors (Ortony, 1975)
○Expressible
○Compact
○Vivid
●Previous applications
○Depression (Beck, 2020; Charteris-Black, 2012; Forceville & Paling,
2018)

13. Procedure
●Asked participants to send 1-3 written metaphors via email 3 days prior to
interviews
●Metaphors were typically feeling as a place
●They walked me through metaphor and explained how each symbol
represented their feelings of emptiness
●I made notes of our interpretation in column on a printout of their metaphors
●Member checking

14. Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths:
●No reliance on intuitive metaphor identification
●Less subjective interpretation
●Sufficient time to elicit metaphors
●Standard protocol
Weakness:
●Participant selection bias
●Written notes

15. Summary
●Metaphor analysis has been used in scale construction to elucidate a highly
abstract constructs such as mood or emotion
●Could metaphor analysis prove useful for researchers operationalizing
abstract and complex constructs such as affect?

16. References
Beck, C. T. (2020). Postpartum Depression: A Metaphorical Analysis. Journal of the American Psychiatric
Nurses Association
Charteris-Black, J. (2012). Shattering the bell jar: Metaphor, gender, and depression. Metaphor and
Symbol, 27(3), 199-216.
Forceville, C., & Paling, S. (2018). The metaphorical representation of depression in short, wordless
animation films. Visual Communication, 1470357218797994.
Hazell, C. (2003). The experience of emptiness. AuthorHouse.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.

17. References (Continued)
Ortony, A. (1975). Why metaphors are necessary and not just nice.
Ortony, A. (1979). Metaphor and thought.