Исследование структур обобщенных групп, выделяемых разными методами, на примере результатов исследования СТАРТ

Социология: методология, методы, математическое моделирование. 2020. № 50-51. С. 37–62.

Абдурахманова Э. М.

In the social sciences, researchers are often faced with the task of classifying objects into meaningful groups, including in education. However, homogeneous groups can be extracted basing on various conceptual foundations leading to the identification of different group structures which might influence the interpretation of the results. The purpose of this study is to compare the structure of groups identified by the methods of cluster analysis and cut-off classification taking into account possible interpretations of results. The data analyzed are drawn from the START  large-scale assessment study. This is a large-scale assessment project that involved 2645 first-grade students from  the Krasnoyarsk region in 2018. Three cases of students’ grouping were investigated by k-means cluster analysis,  latent profile analysis, and cut-off method. The results of the study show that the k-means method cluster structure is  similar to the cut-off method group structure while the results of the analysis of latent profiles are different. The results  of the study show which of these methods is applicable depending on the hypothesis and the purpose of eliciting groups.

Keywords: СТАРТ, метод k-средних, k-means, начальная школа, primary school, стартовая диагностика, latent profile analysis, анализ латентных профилей, cut-off method, baseline assessment, START, метод пороговых значений