I am very excited about this week's discussion. These are the weeks I wish I could talk to you all face to face so we could really get into a deep discussion about nonverbal communication and share what we have learned through our reading, and of course through our experiences in life. While I was in school I participated in a Nonverbal Research Study as a research assistant, which was quite interesting. Although the statistics in that particular research study did not prove to be significant, my conjecture was that the sample size was too small.
Now that you are probably asking, "What was the study about?"....I'll tell you briefly in case you are interested. Dr. Tim Hegstrom who is the Dean of Social Sciences at this point in his career, videotaped dyads to see if their body positioning matched each other during the course of their 10 minute conversation. Most of the participants did have matching body language at some point in the discussion (An example of this would be where one person crosses their arm, and the other follows shortly after. This could either be matching or mirroring with body positioning with legs, arms, etc...). I analyzed the videos one by one (I think there were 50 or so 10 minute videos) and recorded their body positioning to reflect matching, mirroring, or no correlation at all. I stopped the video every minute and recorded their body positions. Like I said, when we ran the statistics through SPSS (a statistical database), the results were not significant. But, had the research been done a bit differently, it absolutely would have produced statistically significant results. Had it, we probably would have been published in a Communication Journal, but alas, it was not written in the stars. :)
Needless to say, Nonverbal Communication interests me quite a bit. My husband's family is constantly trying to figure out if I'm analyzing them. Just this past weekend, one of his family members looked over to a few people and asked me what their body language was saying. Of course this sparked a very interesting conversation between a few people, myself included.
Have fun with this weeks discussion, and don't forget to download the midterm study sheet from Blackboard to prepare for your midterm next week.
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2 comments:
That's pretty interesting; I use SPSS all the time for marketing research...pretty neat program once you get the hang of it.
Does it get annoying that they're always thinking you're analyzing them?
Hi Siral! Yes, it can get annoying at times, but only because they have the idea that a certain movement means one specific thing regardless of context and situation, and because they think I'm an expert, which I am not. At first it was uncomfortable for me, but now I think it's quite entertaining. Sometimes I will do things that make it look like I'm analyzing them, just to make them uncomfortable. This is probably not the best way to handle the situation, but it does make some great conversation. I will have to look up the book you referred to in your post.
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