2025 Volume 75 Issue 4 Pages 108-124
This study aims to clarify the structure of preference values of private women's universities in Japan. Three analytical flows were set up as methods: clustering women's universities, searching for major topics in current female students' electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) data using the topic model LDA, and observing the correlation between these topics and university ratings.
As a result, two factors, size and locality, were extracted, and a four-cluster model was created by plotting 60 women's universities in four quadrants of two dimensions. Then, 22 universities were selected to have the same level of text data, and eight topics were employed. Statistically significant correlations between the topics and university ratings were observed in each cluster. The larger universities with a high locality rate had high levels of “Topic 1: Learning through a wide range of specialties, courses, and seminars”. On the other hand, smaller universities with a high locality rate were found to have a high number of “Topic 3: Enjoyable learning from kind teachers”, while smaller universities with a low locality rate were found to have high numbers of “Topic 5: Foreign languages and international learning” and “Topic 4: Departments related to Psychology, Human Sciences, and Society”.
Based on the results and an analysis thereof, the following preference values are proposed: “vocational education that is overseen by female teachers”, “a role that responds to the conservative tendencies in female students' education”, “the establishment of academic fields that are useful for work and the cultivation of a sense of role within the workplace organization”, and “a gender-specific education system and educational ambience”. Furthermore, this study also makes recommendations for a combination of these proposals for preference values of each cluster.
