Spatial profiling through unsupervised learning of the opinion held by professional collectives with regards to the native and foreign juvenile population

Abstract

The article aims to determine the existence of profiles as a function of the grouping of opinions held by the Spanish law enforcement agencies (FFCCSE, in Spanish), the professionals engaged in direct social intervention with minors and population dedicated to work‐related occupations concerning the native and foreign juvenile population in Spain. For the above ends, a descriptive cross‐sectional study was undertaken. The sample was made of 183 participants, equitably divided between the professional groups involved. The information was collected by means of applying a self-administered questionnaire developed ad hoc for this research. The data analysis was done through a method of unsupervised learning of dimension reduction, multiple correspondence analysis, to especially characterize the behavior of the study variables, positive, negative or neutral opinion according to the occupation of the individual responder, and the origin of the child or adolescent. Among the main findings there is evidence that the FFCCSE is the profesional collective most associated with negative comments, especially towards children and adolescents from the Maghreb. The direct intervention professionals with minors are most associated with positive comments, with those minors coming from Sub-Saharian Africa receiving the highest evaluations. The multivariate multiple correspondence analysis is a particularly adequate tool to spatially characterize underlying structures of the data (profiles).