Foreign Perspectives

This is the first of two days of preparation for the project that we’ll start on Tuesday.

For me, it was the day to look at various aspects of communication, split into three quite distinct modules.

The observational approach looked at a recording of a discussion on “talking proper” which we worked through with the aim of picking out appropriate psychological theories to explain how the group members interacted. As usual with the qualitative approaches, we finished with an attempt at a reflexive analysis of our analysis.

Next up was a quantitive approach to analysing a different discussion. This looked at several different countable features of the discussion from rating scales, to counting gestures to how long each person spoke via interval sampling and highlighted the difficulty in getting consistency between observers.

Finally, we looked at the use of Chi-Squared to do a content analysis on a series of texts and finished off with a thematic analysis of a couple of newspaper articles.

It felt very much a whistle-stop tour of techniques which is, of course, exactly what it was intended to be.

Outside the communications strands, we had a short introduction to the computer suite and how we might search for articles for our project.

Last, but not least, was a choice between a lecture on thematic analysis (compulsory for those who started the main course in February) and the optional one on interpretation of dreams.