Structures of argumentation during group discussions

Social psychological groups research went through a variety of changes during the past decade. On the one hand, the interest shifted from output-oriented research to the processing of information, and on the other hand methodological approaches have changed. Researchers became particularly interested in process analysis of verbal data. In this article, we Would like to show that combining two methods, namely the cognitive mapping, (Axelrod, 1976) and monotonic network analysis (Orth, 1998) can help, dealing with both developments simultaneously. Structures argumentation during group discussions can be extracted and analyzed thoroughly. Furthermore, the approach is valuable for investigating and extracting social representations.