Evaluating the Interdisciplinary Mission of Small Group Research Using Computational Analytics

Richard Kettner-Polley and Charles Gavin founded Small Group Research (SGR) to present research, build theory, and generally advance the study of small groups by combining insights from multiple disciplines. Currently, we evaluate the extent to which this interdisciplinary mission has been upheld over time. To do this, we apply the perspective and tools of big data analytics to the nearly 3 million words that span the 829 articles that comprise the SGR corpus from February 1990 to June 2017. Keyword analysis, ontological ordering, and interdisciplinary content analyses identify intriguing patterns and detect latent trends. Our results speak to the consistent interdisciplinarity of SGR while identifying opportunities for further development and more complex disciplinary integration in research on small groups