Two methods for quantifying similarity between textbooks with respect to content distribution

ABSTRACT Measures of association, which typically require pairwise data, are widespread in many aspects of educational research. However, due to the need to reduce their content to equal numbers of units of analysis, they are rarely found in the analysis of textbooks. In this paper, we present two methods for overcoming this limitation, one through the use of disjoint sections and the other through the use of overlapping moving averages. Both methods preserve the temporal structure of data and enable researchers to calculate a measure of association which, in this case, is the complementary Euclidean average distance, as an indicator of the books’ similarity. We illustrate these approaches by means of a comparative analysis of three commonly-used English and Swedish mathematics textbooks. Analyses were focused on individual tasks, which had all been coded according to the presence or absence of particular characteristics. Both methods produce nearly identical results and are robust with respect to both densely and sparsely occurring characteristics. For both methods, widening the aggregation window results in a slightly increased level of quantified similarity, which is the result of the ‘smoothing effect’. We discuss the relation between the window width and the choice of research question.