[8.5]

James/Gordon: Applied Psycholinguistics and Social Psychology: Project "DRA"

The Daily Round Archives or "DRA" are located in the Department of Psychology on the Manoa Campus of the University of Hawaii, Gartley 213. The materials in these Archives are mostly the contributions of the students of Psychology 222, and consist of systematic data collected on their own daily rounds.

In this first report of our educational experiment it is appropriate to state briefly the philosophy and orientation that motivates this intellectual undertaking. Our experience in teaching undergraduate Social Psychology to large class audiences (i.e., 200+), has convinced us of the enhancing value of involvement in the course topics as an important strategic tool available to the instructor. Involvement can be objectively defined in terms of participatory activity or its density. For instance, assignments, take home exams, and class reports are three commonly used methods for creating involvement through participatory activity.

During the past three semesters of our joint teaching and program developing efforts for Psychology 222, we have been developing, and continue to do so, a series of assignments which involve class members in the participatory activities of collecting materials for an archives that houses data on people's actions, noticings, and thoughts in the course of their day-to-day existence. This growing collection is what we are calling the Daily Round Archives.

[8.5.1]

Contents of the DRA. At his time of development, we cannot state explicitly the overall selection or restriction to be imposed on the content of the materials. Therefore, it would be best t o describe the materials that are currently in the collection.

(a) daily logs kept on an hourly basis using a standard data sheet format that specifies time of the day, location of activity, and what it is (see Chapter 9, Section [9.3.IV]);

(b) microdescriptions of paragraph length on various selected topics and using the present indicative tense for reporting (e. g., sensory self-observations on aches, stretching, blushing, retinal, appetite, energy level, and smells; interior dialog concerning comments to the Self, value expressions, preparing schedules, making plans, emotionalizing, rehearsal, memorizings, unmentionables, feeling arguments, figuring out a conflict, making resolutions, fantasy episodes, meditations, and some others (see Chapter 9, Section [9.3.III-V]);

(c) inventories of personal belongings and schedules (e.g., records, shopping lists, address book contents, personal effects and drawers, contents of closets, car glove compartments, and some others (see Chapter 9, Section [9.3.V]);

(d) reports on relationship activities that are habitual (e.g., noticings about people, one's territoriality, and various transactional events such as gossiping, having an argument, making arrangements, doing something together, and others (see Chapter 9);

(e) transcripts of segments of a dinner conversation or some other occasion of talk which the student records, and some annotations he makes concerning the events that occurs (see Chapter 9, Section [9.3.II]);

(f) other materials still to be catalogued and of a heterogeneous nature (see Chapter 1, Section [1.4]).

The data are in the form of typed pages. Materials contributed by the same person are kept together in one folder so as to permit easy accessibility for comparisons. For instance, data on categories (a) through (d) are available on over 200 individuals so that statistical treatments of correlation, regression, factor analysis, and analysis of variance are feasible on a very large number of single variables. As well, ethnographic contrasts are possible within the restrictions occurring in the format of the reported information. The following is a more detailed description of all materials thus far indexed.

(Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii) Professor L. James (December 1977)

The Daily Round Archives - DRA

(1.) The following Index describes the materials contained in the "DRA" which is a collection of social psychological data on this community's sociocultural resources --the "daily round" of people living here.

(2.) The data covers many dimensions of socialized life: activities (as recorded through logs kept by people of their movements from getting-up time to going to sleep time); talk (as recorded on tape, transcribed, and annotated); interior dialogue (as reported in notes taken by people on their thinking process in various situations); annotations (or comments, reactions, and interpretations of particular socially important "noticings" in the form of "microdescriptions" people offer and which reveal "community cataloguing practices," i.e., beliefs, logic, and implicit theories (attribution of cause, ethnicity, stereotypes, reasoning, etc.); and others, as described in the Index.

(3.) The materials in the DRA are produced by undergraduate students who follow a special sequence in Social Psychology with Leon A. James, Professor of Psychology, University of Hawaii, namely:

Psych 222 Section: ( 2 ) Introduction to Social Psychology

Psych 397: Applied Psycholinguistics in Social Psychology credits

Psych 499: Individual Research in Applied Social Psychology

(9-12 credits)

A student may keep his own work, as in any course, but most students choose to contribute to the DRA as they are interested in learning about naturalistic data gathering procedures, and see the value in objectifying the self (or, one's perceptions of data about the self). Student evaluations are uniformly high and their statements about the educational value of this approach detail the learning features that occur. (These materials may be examined upon request.)

(4.) The DRA collections are primarily educational; that is, they are essentially course work assignments produced and perused by the students enrolled in the above sequence, as well as by graduate students following the Social-Personality Program leading to a Ph. D. in Applied Social Psychology, Psycholinguistics, and Ethnosemantics. The theoretical framework of this specialization is being described in a six-volume series called Community Cataloguing Practices, co-authored by L. James and Dr. Barbara Y. Gordon, a Visiting Colleague at the University of Hawaii (draft copies available upon request.) In this philosophy, educational experience is believed to be furthered by the excitement of "real research," as well as the opportunity to contribute to some on-going tradition that may have a very real value in the future. That is, "daily round data" on people's lives is now largely fictitious: novels, T. V. serials, imaginings about a setting, or subjective assessments culled from memory and recorded as 'answers" to "survey questions." Daily Round data thus rectify a major deficiency of social psychology today by providing objective data, recorded on the spot by cumulative records, and appropriately annotated by the "Witness," i.e., the person.

(5.) The analysis, indexing and classification of the DRA data is accomplished through a methodology called "ethnosemantics." The intent of this formalized theory is to achieve an empirically derived notation system for the description of a "social occasion." At the present, one can transcribe thoughts and utterances given the convenient and pragmatic notation system we know as writing. But no such notation system exists for the transcription of social occasions. We have informal means such as narratives and microdescriptions, with which science and the community must somehow manage. The Daily Round data is potentially the source of such a notation system. In the meantime, its use remains chiefly educational.

(6.) Students and colleagues who are interested in collaborative teaching and research efforts based on the Daily Round Data approach may contact Prof. James (leave messages at 948-7614, Psychology Department office, Gartley Hall). This project and approach to methodology is deeply interdisciplinary with theoretical significance for clinical psychology, the psychology of individual variation, language teaching, literacy, psychohistory, ethnicity, sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, communication theory, pedagogy, management science, environmental studies --in short, wherever there is a special and systematic interest in the ethnodynamics of social occasions.

DRA INDEX

TITLE: Transcript from TV or Movie
REFERENCE NUMBER: S76//(Q)
DESCRIPTION: Students recorded a TV program and transcribed a 10-minute section of dialogue. The reports included an introduction, a description of the notation system used in transcribing, stage directions, an analysis (turn taking, transactional idioms, topical content, participant activities), and an interpretation.

TITLE: Microdescription of Handshake Episode
REFERENCE NUMBER: F75//(R)
DESCRIPTION: Immediately after shaking hands with the person next to them in class, students wrote a detailed description of the event.

TITLE: Paraphrase Outline of Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis
REFERENCE NUMBER: F75//(S)
DESCRIPTION: Working in groups of five each student paraphrased in outline form chapters of Frame Analysis and prepared revisions responsive to Dr. James' written comments.

TITLE: Objectifying Autobiographical Record
REFERENCE NUMBER: F75//(T)
DESCRIPTION: Students prepared an autobiographical analysis using the Social Psychological concepts outlined in Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis. Students made revisions based on professor's comments.

TITLE: Glossary
REFERENCE NUMBER: S75//(U)
DESCRIPTION: Students compiled a glossary based on the lectures, including paragraphs of definitions, examples, relationships of terms, and diagrams.

SEMESTER: Spring 1974

TITLE: IS (Instructional Statement) Pages
REFERENCE NUMBER: S74//V/W
DESCRIPTION: Students prepared 10 "IS" pages based on Erving Goffman's "On face-work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements," and Edward Sampson's Social Psychology. IS pages refers to a method of objectifying the perspective of a writer.

SEMESTER: Fall 1976

TITLE: Interior Dialogue Accompanying a Talking Exchange
REFERENCE NUMBER: F76//E
DESCRIPTION: Students prepared from memory a brief transcript of a talking episode in four columns: 1) transcript lines, 2) stage directions, 3) interior dialogue of the student, 4) interior dialogue of the other person.

TITLE: Outline of Textbook: Social Psychology of Contemporary Society by Edward Sampson
REFERENCE NUMBER: F76//F
DESCRIPTION: Students prepared a handwritten outline of the text using chapter titles, section headings, and italicized terms.

TITLE: Transcript of a 10 Minute Segment of Conversation
REFERENCE NUMBER: F76//G
DESCRIPTION: Students recorded an hour-long conversation in which they participated, and transcribed a 10-minute segrnent with annotations.

TITLE: Students' Transcript Analysis
REFERENCE NUMBER: F76//H
DESCRIPTION: Each student analyzed transcripts prepared by other students.

TITLE: Ocean School Report
REFERENCE NUMBER: F76//I
DESCRIPTION: Students were instructed to spend a half-hour daily in the ocean for two weeks and to record their observations within the framework of the Reacculturation Hexagram.

TITLE: Weekly Round of Activities
REFERENCE NUMBER: F76//J
DESCRIPTION: Students prepared a 24-hour log of their daily conversations for a 7-day period. Each entry specified the time of occurrence, duration, and activity.

TITLE: Black Evaluation
REFERENCE NUMBER: F76//K
DESCRIPTION: At the end of the semester students prepared a list of assertions evaluating the course.

SEMESTER: Spring 1976

TITLE: Impressions and Observations about the First Class and Corrections to Assignment
REFERENCE NUMBER: S76//L
DESCRIPTION: Students reported their impressions and observations of the first day of class. Dr. James wrote comments on each paper, and students prepared responsive "corrections."

TITLE: Discourse Thinking Report
REFERENCE NUMBER: S76//M
DESCRIPTION: Students prepared a transcript with information arranged in four columns: 1) the transcript, 2) stage directions, 3) discourse thinking of the student, 4) discourse thinking of the other person.

TITLE: Comic Strip Interior Dialogue
REFERENCE NUMBER: S76//N
DESCRIPTION: Students prepared a transcript of a comic strip sequence with information arranged in four columns: 1) the comic strip dialogue, 2) stage directions, 3) the imagined interior dialogue of one character, 4) the imagined interior dialogue of the second character.

TITLE:
a. Questions that Occurred to Oneself During the Class Period
b. Questions Asked Aloud During a Day
c. Discussion of Questions Asked Aloud During a Day
REFERENCE NUMBER: S76//O
DESCRIPTION: Students recorded the questions that occurred to them during the class period, all the questions that they found themselves asking aloud during the -day, and added their comments.

TITLE: Transcript
REFERENCE NUMBER: S76//P
DESCRIPTION: Students recorded an hour-long conversation in which they participated and transcribed a 10-minute segment. The reports included an introduction, a description of the notation system used in transcribing, stage directions, an analysis (turntaking, transactional idioms, topical content, participant activities), and an interpretation.

SEMESTER: Spring 1977

TITLE: My Talk
REFERENCE NUMBER: S77//A
DESCRIPTION: Students prepared a transcript segment of a dinner table conversation in which they were a participant, and annotated the transcript.

TITLE: My Daily Round
REFERENCE NUMBER: S77//B
DESCRIPTION: Students prepared a log of their activities during a 24-hour period, from the time they got up in the morning till the following morning. Each entry contained the following information: When? How lone Where? Who? Occasion? Nature of activity?

TITLE: My Standardized Imaginings
REFERENCE NUMBER: S77//C
DESCRIPTION: This assignment is divided into the following five sections: 1) Interior Dialogue, 2) Feeling Arguments, 3) Fantasy/ Daydream Episodes, 4) The Elevated Register, 5) Routine Concerns: Selected Inventories. Students prepared paragraph descriptions from events on their daily round. (Cf. N012 Instructions for Assignments, Psy 322, Spring 1977)

TITLE: My Community of Relationships
REFERENCE NUMBER: S77//D
DESCRIPTION: This assignment is comprised of the following four sections: 1) Notioing Observations, 2) Descriptions of Transactions, 3) Reporting Joint Activities, 4) Non-Joint Activities. Students prepared paragraph descriptions of their activities on their daily round. (Cf. N012 Instructions for Assignments, Psy 322, Spring 1977)

SEMESTER: Fall 1977

TITLE: Research Report I Recording* Interior Dialogue
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//AA
DESCRIPTION: Students tape-recorded the thoughts that occurred to them in the course of a day and reported their observations about their recordings. A record of their daily round accompanied their report. Types of thoughts recorded were impressions, fantasies, judgments, decisions, conversations, etc.

TITLE: Research Report 2 - Diagram Your Knowledge
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//BB
DESCRIPTION: Students were instructed to diagram their knowledge- -personal, social, academic--in several specific ways: by making lists, charts, diagrams, geometric representations, analogies, tree diagrams, and conceptual progressions or series.

TITLE: Research Report 3 - Why Can't They Do It Another Way?
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//CC
DESCRIPTION: Students interviewed cohabitants, c ar-mates, and 'phone pals' for instances where people said to themselves "Why can't they do it another way?" and the actions taken. They included descriptions of incidents and occasions, and of the rationale for action taken. The analysis took the form of charts which were discussed in the report.

TITLE: Research Report 4 - What Should Social Psychology Be?
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//DD
DESCRIPTION: Students answered the question by 1) scanning current texts and professional journals in social psychology, 2) interviewing members of the community, 3) reviewing their lecture notes and course work. The discussion included tables and charts.

TITLE: Inventory Questionnaire
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//EE
DESCRIPTION: Students completed a personal opinion inventory questionnaire (prepared for a pending Ph. D. dissertation) designed to measure the "positivity or negativity" with which a person views the world. The students commented on their reactions after completing the survey.

TITLE: Daily Feedback Sheets ("DFS")
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//FF
DESCRIPTION: After every, class students completed a form reporting (1) % ratings for a) Preparation, b) Comprehension, c) Satisfaction, and d) Intrinsic Interest; and (2) their answers to questions asked by Dr. James during the lectures; and (3) their comments and messages to the professor.

TITLE: Messages on Research Reports
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//GG
DESCRIPTION: Students read each others' research reports and wrote reactions and messages to the authors.

TITLE: Lecture Outlines
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//HH
DESCRIPTION: Students listened to tape recordings of class lectures, and outlined the lectures.

TITLE: Extra Projects
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//II
DESCRIPTION: Miscellaneous projects planned jointly by professor and student.

SEMESTER: Fall 1977

TITLE: Research Report 1 - Daily Round Sociomap
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//JJ
DESCRIPTION: Students in Psychology 397 prepared a Daily Round Log and drew a map representing their comings and goings for the day.

TITLE: Research Report 2 and 3 -
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//KK
DESCRIPTION: Students in Psychology 397 surveyed several of their courses by filling out Daily Feedback Sheets (DFS) during five consecutive lectures. Data include overall personal ratings (preparation, comprehension, satisfaction, intrinsic interest) and various comments on the lecture. Students analyzed and discussed the data.

TITLE: Inventory Questionnaire (397)
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//LL
DESCRIPTION: (see ref. # F77//EE)

TITLE: Daily Feedback Sheets (DFS) (397)
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77HMM
DESCRIPTION: (see ref. # F77HFF)

TITLE: Messages on Research Reports
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//NN
DESCRIPTION: (see ref. F77//GG)

TITLE: Lecture Outlines
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//OO
DESCRIPTION: (see ref. # F77//HH)

TITLE: Extra Projects
REFERENCE NUMBER: F77//PP
DESCRIPTION: (see ref. # F77//II)

[8.5.2]

Uses of the DRA. We envisage two principal uses for these archives. One is educational and the other is research. The educational benefits fall in two categories: the collection of data, per se, and the analytic treatment thereof. At the present time these are to be considered experimental working hypotheses which we are attempting to document as we go along. We have plenty of opportunity to hear favorable reactions (and in a minority of cases, unfavorable) but we feel that evaluative reactions or ratings represent but a small amount of

the total variance in a student's actual contact in a course, and therefore, there is need for better and more behavioral measures than the averaging of subjective ratings of students. (See Chapter 2.)

The collection of data involving such materials is a standard feature of Psychology 222, and the majority of students contribute their data to the Archives in either case, the collection per se is emphasized as important for the objective study of the Self in one's natural daily community environment. The requirements of following a standard and complex instructional assignment is a context for practicing and learning a writing register that is indispensable in many places in the community (e. g., science, management, communications, education, community action, and so on wherever educated literacy is a component skill to the person's activities).

As well, the content of the reports constitutes explicit facts about the person which are not usually exposed to one's deliberate view. Students have reported that they were surprised at many of the facts that emerged. Also, looking at the content of data from classmates is often the first opportunity students have to see contrasts and similarities concerning ordinary day to day business. Even if anonymous, the data are illuminating in that they serve as a reference point not unlike survey reports do. The student's awareness and understanding should therefore be enhanced, which is again a conclusion that needs documentation.

Finally, students are taught methods of systematic tabulation and data slicing, which are at the heart of learning, practicing, and gaining an understanding of the scientific research method of investigation. Students who wish to do more extensive analytic and experimental studies involving the Archives materials can do so by taking the follow up courses we are (e.g., Psych 397, 499, 661).

In connection with the second use of the Archives, namely research, the possibilities have not been fully worked out though it is obvious that such collections are of interest to several sectors of academic domains (viz., social psychology, individual differences, cross-cultural comparisons, psycholinguistics, ethnosemantics, ethnography, sociollinguistics, community psychology, clinical psychology, home economics, architecture, social engineering, anthropology, public administration, mental health, English as a Second Language, etc. ---- in short, wherever information on the daily round as natural human habitat is needed).

[8.5.3]

Procedures for Contributions and Use. Besides the students of Psychology 222, other students we work with at the undergraduate and graduate level also make contributions from time to time inasmuch as we advise them of

the value of performing the task of collection and analysis. As well, anyone may contribute whether or not they will be further involved with the project. All contributions must meet the format specifications which we provide in written instructions. (see Chapters 9 and 11.) These instructions specify the information to be collected and the exact details to be recorded. As well, the instructions discuss the issue of protection of privacy of the contributor and the people that may be mentioned in the reports, particularly the necessity of disguising identity information. All Archives data are anonymous and there is no way of recovering individual identities since this information is destroyed once the material is made an official part of the Archives.

Qualified researchers, investigator, and students, who are interested in examining the Archives materials may do so by permission. Please contact us at the Psychology Office, leaving your name, telephone number, and message for our return call.

[8.5.4]

Theoretical and Methodological Significance. Though we have different disciplinary background and training, our professional careers have overlapped and resulted in what we judge to be a very useful collaboration. Dr. Barbara Gordon's doctoral dissertation at Columbia University (1962) had as its main objective, the discovery of hypothetically postulated correlations between cognitive processes and linguistic features; these she called "linguistic-cognitive correlates they occupied the focus of research and attention of many educators in the 1960's involved in new and large scale federal programs for the so called "disadvantaged minorities" (see, e.g., Aarons, Gordon, and Stewart, 1969, which reviews this literature in depth).

The search for linguistic-cognitive correlates has mushroomed into such fields as educational linguistics, applied psycholinguistics, ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguistics, though it should be said that these fields have had more than one founding theme and, certainly, have evolved in the 1970's to include such well known current issues as bilingual education, language teaching, community linguistics, language planning, problems of dialect and Standard English as a Dialect, and possibly others.

These applied features of a specialized interest in language behavior have been variously discussed in the theoretical literature under such specific topics as discourse analysis, kinesics, ethnomethodology, cognitive processes, test and measurement, theory of programming, semantics, rhetoric, composition, artificial intelligence, and possibly others (see Clarke and Clark, 1977; Sudnow, 1972; Carr, 1972; Rosen and Rosen, 1973; Gumperz, 1972; Pawley, 1977 ; Carroll and Freedle, 1972; and many others). These theoretical interests share the common methodology which also unites them; this methodology consists of the attempt to reconstruct a natural sequence of behavior. Discourse analysis operates on natural social products, namely recorded streams of speech occurring in some social setting at some definite time and place. Kinesics reconstructs the formal representation of actual gestures performed in naturally occurring conversations. Discrete point testing of linguistic-cognitive correlates starts with the theoretically significant parameters of actual behavior in the form of skills whose parameters operationally define competence. In simpler form, we can say that tests are basically inventories of behavioral habits we may call "community practices." This is particularly visible in the case of scholastic achievement tests where the achiever must conform to a fairly narrow (one might say, 'nationalistic' here) definition of knowledge and educational process skills.

Dr. Leon James' doctoral dissertation at McGill University (also in 1962) was an experimental exploration of experimental semantics, and therefore certainly theoretical enough and protected from pragmatic accountabilities. More particularly, his search for linguistic-cognitive correlates led him to take cognitive reactions literally and looked at the issue from the other end of the barrel; namely, do known physiological processes cause visible effects in language related behaviors? The answer was always positive, and after some period, the search was abandoned.

It dawned on us both at about the same time that we ought to switch our focus to naturally occurring units of language behavior. Our change of focus away from experimentally motivated units of analysis was considerably quickened upon our encounter with the already on-going work in ethnomethodology, especially, in our case, Harvey Sacks (1966) and Harold Garfinkel (1967). We should also include here as significant influences on us, the writings of Erving Goffman (1974). These three sociologists impressed upon us a methodological concern with the microdescription and cataloguing of language behavior occurring in natural social settings. It is to Goffman that we owe the most apt phrase of "the daily round" to refer to the objective delimitation of an individual's visible presence in the community. (See the discussion in Chapter 8, Sections 8.1 and 8.2)

Our own research focus in the past two years and since our previous publication (James and Gordon, 1975-77) has concentrated on operationalizing the meaning of the daily round; that is, developing theoretical rationales for sampling naturally occurring units within specified situational contexts. In other words, we worked on methods for specifying (a) what natural units are, and (b) how to locate them within the stream of the daily round. Thus, categories (a) through (e) in the current version of the Daily Round Archives (see above, Section [8. 5. 1]), constitute our solutions to the sampling problem, as far as it goes in the current version (see James and Gordon, 1975-77).

Though we cannot detail the full account here --and we invite the interested student to consult our typed notes that run to over a thousand pages (see James and Gordon, 1975-77)--we ought nevertheless to present the main results of our undertaking. This we do in the next section with is both lengthy and technical, though hopefully, not obscure (available upon request). We invite the interested student and colleague to consult with us on further issues or elaborations relating to our ideas, and we welcome such contacts.