#4 - Research idea
Our group is comprised of Evan, Lisa, and Dustin. We’re interested in exploring gender differences in online, text-based communication. Specifically, we want to find out which gender gives clearer, more understandable directions using only text.
In a text-based environment, speakers cannot rely on visual indicators and demonstrations (two aspects of
In our experiment, we will ask participants of each gender, via instant messenger, how to complete a variety of tasks. These may be relatively complex tasks that the participants may not have any personal experience with. Our job as experimenters will merely be to introduce the task to the participant and serve as a moderator for the duration of the experiment. Other than moving the experiment along, we will not have any interaction with the participants so as not to produce biased results.
For example, one conversation might go as follows:
Us: Please explain how to tie your shoes.
Participant: well, first you need to cross one lace over the other…
… and so on, until the participant has (in his or her mind) satisfactorily addressed the issue.
We will then print out transcripts of these conversations and show them to a second group of participants. They will be instructed to rate each conversation on various criteria on a numeric scale (e.g. 1 to 7), such as how clear the directions are and how well the person giving the instructions seems to understand the task. They will also be asked if they think the person is male or female.
This study has many far-reaching implications. Are instruction manuals written by a particular gender more understandable? Might it make a difference if the help section of a web site is authored by a man or a woman? And, more generally, does the absence of visual aids affect the speech of one gender more than another?
posted by Evan @ 2:23 PM
2 Comments:
Perhaps another question for your project might be which gender is better at understanding directions if they are given via online communication. Thus, similar to what you mentioned, which gender can more easily progress to the higher levels of Clark’s model (but now on the other side) when they cannot receive visual signals from the other person.
For the experiment, what if the participants have different knowledge about the tasks, i.e. a male might be more familiar with Task A, while a female may be more familiar with Task B. Then wouldn’t it naturally be easier for them to explain the task to another person, regardless of their gender and method of communication?
Firstly, there has been a fair amount of work done in this field. The conclusions have usually come back that there is no one way to determine, based on language, what another person's gender is. There have been some indicators –such as women use more language softeners and longer sentences – but the reasons for this are unknown.
Secondly, I think your study could answer a number of very interesting questions about gender and instructions. But I also think it’s important you take into account the rater’s gender and background, as it’s not just the instructions that count but the participants as well. You may find that although there is no difference in the way genders give out instructions (though I doubt this will happen), there is a difference in the way they interpret instructions. Make sure you have males’ and females’ instructions rated together and have the raters rate males’ and females’ responses in one sitting to prevent any kind of bias.
Finally, your own experiment raises an ironic but important point – does it matter what the sex of the experimenter who’s giving the instructions is? You could use that as a way to test directions outside of text-based CMC.
Post a Comment
<< Home