Author- Deborah Tannen
Year Published- 1992
Title- You just don't understand men and women in conversation
City Published- St. Ives
Publisher- Virago
Pages Used- 336
“It is natural in interaction to assume that what you feel in reaction to others is what they wanted to make you feel. If you feel dominated, it’s because someone is dominating you''
You could test this by analysing a conversation between two people with a clear difference of power. Afterwards ask the less powerful participant how they felt and the more powerful participant how they intended to make the other person feel.
ReplyDeleteYou could test this by analysing a conversation between two people with a clear difference of power. Afterwards ask the less powerful participant how they felt and the more powerful participant how they intended to make the other person feel.
ReplyDeleteYou could set up tasks that parent and child or teacher and student or boss and employee have to do together for different power levels, or pick same supposed power level and do male/female pairings to see if dominance theory holds up in your peer group or if the hypothesis is unsupported by the data - that is often more interesting. You could link to defecit traits as well as Tannen's pairings. The questionnaire might be far less reliable data but would be interesting to look at in the light of what you analysed as having actually taken place. You could draft a questionnaire with carefully phrased questions - that would be a challenge (not to lead the respondents to particular answers). I would take a look at it to see if I thought it would be problematic.
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