Thursday, January 28, 2010

don't let this happen to you

this is your brain. this is your brain doing data analysis




some piles of data

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

thematic codes

first things first:
  • I ejected the ‘basic emotions” stuff to the linguistic counting section . . . the simple point to make from that data is that we humans are not really that basic in our communication of emotions. we need more vocabulary, more than “basic,” to understand one another.
  • also completely eliminated the “cognitive/conscious/unconscious/social” stuff, because there are too many definitional problems.

so I am left with four main codes to work through:

  1. what did their explanations of their “interpretation of emotions across cultures” look like? (what did they say they were doing as individuals)
  2. how did their cultural scripts come into play?
  3. when there was disagreement, what social and cognitive processes did they demonstrate in their focus group interactions?
  4. finally, what insights we draw for the teaching cross-cultural emotional interpretation?

now I have to sort out the sub themes.

final codes

just want to list the final codes and give a brief summary of my thoughts on each.

ultimately, I have four different sets of codes.

one set is a “linguistic” coding (although more like counting) set. what words did the focus groups use in their discussions? does this linguistic data show that the different groups even though they were looking at identical clips discuss the same or different things? even if they did not use identical words were there synonyms being used in similar discussions? were there things that both Korean groups discussed that neither (or just one) western group did? and vice versa, were there notions that the westerners discussed that the koreans did not? were there things that only one group discussed?

another set is the “intensity” coding comparisons of the basic emotion list. I have yet to do this, but the sample size is small. actually, I think I should drop this, because it mixes the methods more than I would like. in the end, the comparison is going to be statistical and may prove very little. did the Korean groups’ intensity ratings differ significantly form the intensity ratings of the westerners? the standard deviation seem to be fairly broad, so I don't see much chance for statistical significance with a small sample like this one. in the future, this could be a fairly simple correlative study.

a third set of codes is the “channel” coding. what aspects of the communicative event did the westerners and koreans look at in determining what emotions were being expressed? are there differences between and amongst the different groups? there is an excel chart that summarizes these results on a previous post.

the final, hardest, and most important (I think) set is the “thematic” coding. that deserves a separate post.

talked w/ yoonhwa

good planning progress, but little other progress today, sigh...

Sunday, January 24, 2010

two week progress report

in five minutes, what have I done in the last two weeks?

  • finished the thematic coding
  • got it off to the primary peer reviewer
  • got it back (ok, that is not me, but something done for the project).
  • looked lexically at the words they used in their discussion.
    • created categories of words
    • listed "universal" emotions and recognizable intensity variants
    • listed other emotion catagories
    • as well as the frequencies
    • BUT I did not cross list for different focus groups . . .
    • fortunately TAMS will let me do that fairly well.
    • here is that summary:
      • basic
          fear disgust sadness surprise anger happiness

      • other
          gen. arousal (anticipation) gen. agony (pain) shyness "weighingoptions" (noonchi) gen. "nice" character gen. "bad" character - arrogance flattery archetypes interest guilt (shame/embarrassment) anxiety relief (post-anxiety) showing no emotion (calm) true v. false conflicted (mixed/confused)


  • coded all of the "behavioral" cues
  • compared the frequency of the different code for different nationalities and for individual focus groups
that's a good amount of data analysis!

soooo . . . . . I am getting closer. here are the things I would like to do this week:
  • complete a second thematic coding of the data.
    • did a partial review . . .
    • read Yoonhwa’s notes
    • discuss with her today
    • decide if I need to go back and do all four focus groups again
  • write my advisor.
  • contact the program and register for courses.
  • [tertiary coding?] look at how the participants coded the basic emotions and of their intensity.
  • outline chapter 4
  • member checks?
  • revise the methodology section regarding data collection and data analysis.
  • look at the edits for the first three chapters.
a few things left to do today. some more for tomorrow.

digging deeper into behavioral coding

I wanted to dig deeper into the behavioral codes. It was fairly easy to break the individual focus groups out of the "big transcript" of all of the focus groups and then do a code count . . . [while I think there is something to be learned from breaking each individual participant out of each focus group, that process will take more time . . . time is running :(]


the neat thing is that three of the focus groups showed almost identical patterns in this analysis. that is the relative frequency of the codes of each type was remarkably similar. Check it out.


the "freakazoid" group, and I say that in the nicest possible way, was the first western group--the green line. Funny thing is that at least one participant in that group said something to the effect of "I'm so perverse in how I look at people: I will probably wreck your study." lol :)

However, now that I look at it, the "freakazoid group" is not really that freaky . . . only a couple of data points are substantially different . . . I think I can argue that at least.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

behavioral codes in the bag

here are the summary code counts from that part of the coding process:


Appraisal 185
Circular 31
Lexical_Semantic 25


Behavior>Face 136
Behavior>Gestures 41
Behavior>Kinesic 97
Behavior>Prosodic 46
Behavior>Proxemic 21

Total behaviorial 341

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

reverse appraisal

noticed something today.

in answering questions of what emotion do you see and why the participants were answering not my question: "why did you say that emotion was expressed--what did you see or hear?" but a completely different question: "why do you think he/she was feeling the emotion that you think he was feeling. What would that person's reason for feeling that way be?"

in other words, they are doing a sort of "reverse appraisal." That is the opposite of what Scherer says that when we understand a situation and that appraisal/understanding causes us to feel and express an emotion. particularly i noticed this occuring when the 'denotative' situation and the participants expectations of what emotions 'ought to be' expressed did not exactly match.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

after a mini holiday

idea(s?) to save:
  • in coding the cues mentioned by the participants, I found direct examples of mixed emotions with multiple and conflicting emotional cues.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

day to recover from

some days are setbacks . . . or at least so little forward movement was made that is seems that way. today was almost that bad :).

as I was entering the data from the "non-basic" emotion words used in the focus groups. I noticed a couple of things. one, I had actually made far more groups than I had estimated yesterday at the end of the job. instead of 8-10 there were actually 16 -- plus a fairly healthy handful (~20?) of words that did not really fit into any of these categories. next, and I think I have yoonhwa to blame for this revelation, just calculating the averages and sums does not really show what happened across cultures and within groups in the discussion of these concepts. what if one group talked about schadenfreude a lot, but none of the rest of them did? does that make it invalid? if all of the groups talked about anger about with the same frequency, does that make it more salient? a "qualified" yes to both questions, and the qualification is that it is fairly easy to imagine exceptions to each rule. an obvious structural research design example is how the weigookin got to discuss a summary of what the koreans had said. if they had not already discussed some item in the korean summary, they would after in the discussion of the summary. so precisely where in the north american focus groups discussion the item occurs matters.

then the bad things started to happen :)

do you know how annoying it is to reroll a roll of toilet paper? neither do I, but rerolling half a roll of toilet paper is a real pain--and it barely fit back on the roller. since every four year-old is required to unroll at least one roll of toilet paper, that alone should be reason not to have another child after the oldest gets to be four.

potentially newly minted phrase of the day: "toddler inertia"
a toddler in motion tends to stay in motion. a toddler at rest tends to stay at rest.
you know how they don't want to go to day care, but at the end of the day, they don't want to come home? man, it was hard to get yoojin out of the house today. but the minute he got up on my shoulders, everything was ok.

of course following rapidly on the heels of that event, the cell phone fell out of my pocket. really hard to meet up with people nowadays without a cell phone . . . we used to be able to do it, but now we are dependent on the cellie. the person meeting me got to talk with the bus driver. daejeon city bus terminals seem to be way-the-heck-out-in-nowhere.

and what day would be complete without an accident . . . after being awakened from a doze in the back seat of the car when arriving at costco and being placed in a shopping cart. actually kind of convenient . . . he was sitting down, so it shot straight down through the shopping car onto the parking lot . . . wonder if anyone walked through that? another fortunate thing was the fancy hand dryer in the costco. was able to rise out yoojin's underpants and get them pretty dry pretty quickly. of course, the other dude in the bathroom did not get to dry his hands.

no real energy to do more when we got home, got the groceries put away and got some dinner eaten.

still lots left to do:
  • conduct a secondary coding of the data.
  • code the different behavioral characteristics: kinesic, proxemic, or whatever.
  • look at how the participants coded the basic emotions and of their intensity.
  • outline chapter 4
  • revise the methodology section regarding data collection and data analysis.
  • look at the edits for the first three chapters.
  • write my advisor.
  • contact the program and register for courses.
still I did do something today.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

it's a magic number

ok day three.

bachelor dad and doing data analysis. yoojin is so good and helpful. ok he does not always do what he is told, but he is cute about asking and tries to do what is right. if you ask him--sometimes it takes ten or fifteen tries--he will do something. he honestly wants to help--particularly when you make brownies.

first thing I did this morning was some simple counting of the words that clearly fit into the basic emotions categories, as well as establishing the clusters of words that represent the intensity of each emotion. then put those numbers in a spreadsheet. then wrapped up the little bits of paper and made mini envelopes for them. all that left the table much less crowded, but unfortunately that is the way that it stayed most of the the day . . . cooking and cleaning and eating with yoojin.

finally, however, yoojin finished his day and went to sleep, so my own anxiety kept me up working on the remaining sixty percent of the not satisfactorily 'basic' emotion words that I had indexed from the transcripts . . . ended up with around 8-10 clusters in this group that do not clearly fit into the 6 basic emotions. clusters like: general anxiety, bad characteristics with embedded emotions (eg. "bastard"), or embarrassment and guilt. still a few words did not fit well in any of these clusters. anyway, those slips of paper are still on the table to be tabulated and packaged up. will do that first thing in the morning.

read yoonhwa's peer review notes. I think I understood them . . . a couple of questions to ask . . . and then I have to do what she recommended.

what else to do:
  • conduct a secondary coding of the data.
  • code the different behavioral characteristics: kinesic, proxemic, or whatever.
  • look at how the participants coded the basic emotions and of their intensity.
  • outline chapter 4
  • revise the methodology section regarding data collection and data analysis.
  • look at the edits for the first three chapters.
  • write my advisor.
  • contact the program and register for courses.
progress was made . . . do something every day.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

the second day of the rest of the dissertation

Taking care of a four year old can be like juggling cats.

Taking care of a four year old and trying to do data analysis on your dissertation is like juggling cats until they fall asleep, and then propping your eyes open while you juggle around your categories while praying that they will make some sense to other human beings, because nothing really makes much sense after all that cat juggling.

Nonetheless, I took the emotion words and put them into Ekman's categories (ADHFSS: anger, disgust, happiness, fear, sadness, surprise), and started to look at some other things that are going on with the character of our focus group discussions.

One thing I can say is there was a fairly frequent and deep conversation on happiness, fear, and anger; but little about disgust, sadness, and surprise. Of course, that has a lot to do with the clips that were watched. Another interesting thing that I noticed was that, linguistically speaking, we have a fairly good cluster of words around in happiness, fear and anger that serve to represent pretty straightforwardly the emotions, but also show a pretty subtle palate of intensities. For example, words in the angry constellation ranged from enraged and outraged to irritated and annoyed in our conversation.

Yet there were EVEN MORE words that did not really fit in any of these categories, but were also clearly emotion words. Where does "guilt" fit in. The point of the study is not really to do a discourse or conversation analysis, so this part need be only a little superficial, but the point here is to help show that in discussing the culture differences around emotion, we are going to need a fairly wide range of vocabulary to get to the subtle differences in emotion words and words to depict mixed emotions and varying emotional intensities.

OK. Tomorrow, I finish the categories to see if some additional clusters of emotion words crop up in the "not ADHFSS" words. Also want to review yoonhwa's comments on the first run of coding. Finally, want to try and run codes on the which cues were paid attention to in interpreting the emotions.

Day two of the last of the dissertation is done.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

starting today

so the whole point of making this blog is to force me to write every day -- and to write about my dissertation -- and to think about my dissertation.

The dissertation is about the differences in how Koreans and North Americans interpret the emotions that are communicated by Korean people.

This is what I have so far:
  • I've conducted maybe half a dozen focus groups with both Korean people and Western people.
  • I have had those focus groups audio recordings transcribed and where necessary translated into English.
  • I've gone through and put a preliminary set of codes on those transcripts.
  • I've asked my peer reviewer to look over those codes, and she has come back to me with a reply -- that I have not read yet :-(.
  • I have indexed all the emotion words in the transcripts in order to cross reference those emotion words to among other things basic emotions.
  • I've developed a coding system for categorizing the different sorts of behavioral characteristics that are used to justify the interpretation of specific emotions [ E.g. whether it's tone of voice, facial expression, situational interpretation, or something else ].
However, there is still a ton of further work to be done.
  • I need to read the peer reviewer notes.
  • I need to take into consideration those notes as I conduct a secondary coding of the data.
  • I need to look at the different behavioral characteristics that have been mentioned in the text and code those. Whether they are kinesic, proxemic, or whatever.
  • I need to go back in revised my methodology section to indicate what I have actually done in data collection and data analysis.
  • I need to go back and look at the edits that Schwandt gave me and incorporate them in the first three chapters.
  • I need to... um... write chapters four and five.
  • I need to write my thesis advisor.
  • I need to contact the program and register for courses.
So, I'm almost done.