"Do pre-existing linguistic stereotypes generate a realistic perception of how different social groups use the word 'good' and its synonyms?" or something to that effect?
We want to study a few different social (stereotypical) groups and see how they use the word 'good' or a synonym such as 'sick', 'bad', 'wicked' etc and how they use these in different environments, such as at work, college, home, or with friends.
We aim to use research methods:
1. questionnaire/interview
2. corpus
3. examples from tv/media
4. secondary material including books, internet sources.
This is a well chosen topic, in that it allows you to focus on something very specific. I think it's probably still rather wide, though, in trying to explore a range of lexical items in various groups and various settings, and so you might do well to restrict it in both of these dimensions: small and detailed is often better than broad and therefore vague.
ReplyDeletePlease do read the textbook (e.g. p.81) and view the v-lectures on reading around and especially on framing research questions. As it stands, your draft question invites a response of either 'yes' or 'no', but it's much more likely that the answer will not be as clear cut. It also contains a presupposition - that perceptions are generated by stereotypes, which is hard to demonstrate.
Please don't be discouraged; this IS a hard thing to do and takes practice. Maybe it would help to say something like, 'There is evidence [assuming you have some] that people associate the use of different synonyms for 'good' with speakers belonging to different social groups. To what extent are these beliefs well founded?' Of course you need quite a lot of data to explore this question, so think about the range of informants you need, and consider narrowing the question down further if you can realistically have access to only some of these.
You could do your study in two parts, finding out first how a range of people THINK people in different categories choose from these synonyms and then exploring whether there is evidence that speakers DO do this - though that evidence might be harder to collect, as people often don't self-report accurately.
I may have misunderstood what you want to find out, so please see this as just a suggestion to take you a bit further with your planning.
Okay, how about, to keep the focus partially on representation in the media, we change the question to: 'To what extent do representations of different social groups in the media accurately portray the ways these social groups use the word 'good' and its synonyms?'
ReplyDeleteRepresentation in 'the media' will probably need to be made more concise (maybe TV dramas or soaps?) to allow a thorough investigation of one topic, rather than a vague covering of a large topic.
I feel that too much evidence would be needed to thoroughly investigate how the representation of groups in the media might influence people's own perceptions and, furthermore, how people actually do use the word 'good' and its synonyms. Ultimately, this would stray from the objective we set in our initial discussion, and would be a little too broad or a project of this size, in my opinion.
Good suggestion, Michael. Still a bit problematic, though, to establish what counts as 'accurate' (not to mention, as you say, the quite wide scope of what we mean by 'the media'). My inclination - and this is only a suggestion, and depends on what you want to know - would be to take one genre (e.g. soaps) and one social category (e.g. speakers aged roughly 15 - 20) and start by finding out how often such characters do describe something using one of the words you have in mind. From this, you might be able to construct a series of mini scenarios, containing the dialogue used by the scriptwriters, but with the target word omitted. You could present these to actual informants, asking them to supply an omitted word. Is this clear? This is not thoroughly worked out, but you could modify it, maybe. Let me know what you think.
ReplyDeleteI have sent you all a voice email in response to your draft GLA. I have a concern about the extent of involvement of all members of your group, but apart from that I think you have made some excellent progress already, and the comments I have made in the message are intended to help you as you move to the next phase. You may want to refine/modify the GLA, but it represents a very thorough account of where you have got to and therefore any changes should not need to be very great.
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work.