Frank Ritter, IST 331 7 November 2001, revised 31 October 2006, 27 Oct 09
In this lab you are encouraged to look at group behavior. To study groups, they have to have something to do. Your groups will do work in the context of an information seeking task. The task is designed to allow the exploration of how different communication media influence behavior, how to code such data, and how you might start to explore group dynamics.
You will be asked to note
(a) Will all group members contribute equally?
(b) How will group members participate? Will they all take turns, will one or two dominate, and/or will there be a round-robin effect only among particular members?
(c) How much time will the group spend on the task and how much of the time will they talk about other topics?
(d) Any other initial hypotheses you might look toward testing.
The subjects will be groups from the class itself. They will perform a simple but open ended interactive task, <topic to be filled in verbally in class>. Groups of 3 to 4 student work as subjects, another group of 3-4 work as observers. These would be made from two to three project groups in the class. This can be called a meta-group.
With 27 class project groups, about 10-13 meta-groups can be formed. 1/2 of the meta groups should interact verbally, and 1/2 should interact using IM (only) to communicate. (Remaining groups will be distributed amongst the created groups).
For instance,
1 observe 2 voice search (one meta group)
3 observe 4 IM search (another meta group), creating a paired meta group.5 observe 6 voice search
7 observe 8 IM search (etc.)
Some of the groups will interact directly and verbally. Other groups will only use instant messenger. This will provide material for discussions about how the behavior of people and groups changes depending on the medium they use to communicate. You must use data from two different types of meta-groups of subjects.
The coders are instructed as a group about how to code the behavior.
The groups solved the task of searching for "resources for IST 331", while being observed by the coders. They search together, with one display, for about 12 minutes.
Coders computed how many times each participant 'spoke', the transition frequencies of who spoke after who (this is easist done by just recording order and later coding transitions), how many utterances were on- and off-topic, and if there are four coders, how fast and where progress was made on the task.
In your project group's writeup (that is, there will be 1 writeup per metagroup), you should reference this page if the procedure goes to plan, and then note what you found. You should particularly emphasize the analyses you performed on the data you gathered and the results you can document. This can take up to 1 page intro, up to 1 page method (which might be a paragraph), 1 page results (or more) including a plot, table, etc., and at least 1/2 page discussion.
You should note what insights you obtained from having observed actual behavior, and how these differed from your initial beliefs about how groups would work (which might fit into the intro).
You must correctly and successfully cite a conference paper, a journal article, or a book, one that is not a required reading on the syllabus (but they can be optional or referenced through the syllabus). Successful means pertinant, clear, and you have seen the paper and read it (or one of your group has).