Mini investigation

For my investigation I have decided to see if the dominance theory applies to natural speech between male and females. I wanted to investigate this as the Zimmerman and West theory states the males are more dominant than females and do this through the use of interruptions and or overlaps during conversation, this could also like to Tannen’s pairing theory of competition vs co-operation suggesting males compete during conversation whereas females are co-operative and support each other through speech.

Hypothesis-  I predict to find that the male participant in my data will be more dominant than the females.

Methodology-  I randomly selected two different natural speech transcripts from the internet and made sure each one had one male and one female participant. Too make sure I avoided bias I didn’t read all possible transcripts available I picked the first two I found with a male and female. This was done so that I did not specially select transcripts which would contain the ideal amount of data I am counting that would be in favour of my hypothesis.

Analysis-

	Male	Female
Cooperative overlap	2	1
interruptions	1	0
No. of words avrg per turn	10	18

 

Conclusion/evaluation- Overall from my data pool there is evidence from the data I collected and the data does support my hypothesis as males interrupt and overlap one more time each than females do therefore this suggests that the males are more dominant from the transcripts that I analysed. The data show us that women have a higher number average of words per turn therefore this may highlight why males interrupted and overlapped more because they had less air time a maybe felt the need to say something that couldn’t wait or to possible get their point across. However the males mostly cooperatively overlapped therefore they weren’t trying to compete with the females, this isn’t representative for Tannen’s pairing of cooperation vs competition as the males are more cooperative than the females show by the data collected. The males may feel as if they need to be more cooperative with the females due to their higher amount of air time so if the males interrupted they might fee that it would have to relevant and appropriate to the conversation and to what the female was saying previously. However as I only collected two transcripts this is a huge limitation to my investigation as this isn’t an accurate representation of the wider population therefore the hypothesis may not be legitimate to apply in general  as it has limited evidence for this hypothesis even though it is supported. Also in my transcript I only had two participant’s one male and one female, this is also a limitation as if there were more participants involved of mixed gender the data collected may be significantly different. This could be because one or even both genders might behave differently when there are more people involved within the conversation for example a male might feel the need to dominate the conversation more if there were a higher number of females present at that time or even if there was a higher number of males one male may interrupt more to enforce his dominance over the other participants.

To improve this investigation next time I will need to analyse and collect data from a higher number of transcripts that also contain a varied number of mixed gender participants. This would create a wider pool of data to collect from, effectively giving me more accurate data. As well as measuring how many times males and females interrupt and overlap along with the number of words per turn, I could also further investigate Tannen’s pairing theory by analysing whether the participants stick to the adjacency pairs of a question and an answer or a statement and an answer and then see if any participants or how many break the adjacency pairing, showing competition rather than cooperation.

TRANSCRIPT 1

 

SALLY: so how's your new job going

JOHN: well (.) you know (.) all right

SALLY: what you doing then

JOHN: this week I've just been on the phones      *SALLY: what (.) selling

JOHN: no they're doing like a survey (.) what people think of the the service and all that

SALLY: that's a bit off (.) so you've got to deal with all the moaning and complaining all the flak

JOHN: no (.) no it's just like a questionnaire were your goods delivered on time yes or no

SALLY: d'you think you'll stick it     *JOHN: next week I'm with the regional manager out on the on the road (.) that'll be all right

SALLY: I was on the phones at the Town Hall (.) dead boring

JOHN: tell me about it

SALLY: so what's your mate doing

JOHN: who

SALLY: you know what sisface (.) had the Mohican           *JOHN: Oh Gizmo

SALLY: yeh

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT 2

 

M: What vegetables?

W: Vegetables, bloody expensive vegetables                    *M: Yeah, but when you see the

W: Ridiculously expensive, I’ve hardly vegetables, they’re always like eaten any vegetables since I’ve been here

too bloody expensive

M: Yeah

W: You’ve got to start going to the lunch specials with the salads.