Bodily Communication by Argyle Michael;

Author:Argyle, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Research Methods

For encoding research some method is needed to generate gestures or other movements. For emblems one way is simply to ask people to enact expressions like ‘be quiet’, or ‘I don’t know’. For illustrators people can be asked to describe shapes or objects, and their bodily movements observed. For self-touching and emotional movements it is necessary to create the emotion as usual. For encoding research it is also necessary to describe or classify bodily movements. We saw how this can be achieved in terms of physical variables in the cases of spatial and vocal behaviour. There are a number of elaborate and sophisticated ways of doing the same for bodily movement, methods which have been devised for sports psychology, for example (Rosenfeld 1982). However, such methods have not as yet been found useful in the study of bodily communication. It has been more usual to codify movements using the perceptions of trained observers, using categories which have been established by research workers.

An early approach was that of Birdwhistell (1970), who developed a large and detailed vocabulary of bodily movements with the idea that these would function like the words in a language. However, no evidence has been collected that these elements are used consistently, in different contexts, or that they are linked by a grammar, and the scheme has not been used by others. Laban (1975) devised a method for describing movements in dance, which is used for recording ballet. There are a lot of elements for the feet, and for broad bodily movements, and great skill is needed to use the system. This too has seen little use in NVC research (but see Davis 1979).

Much more successful have been category schemes devised by ethologists. McGrew (1972), for example, listed over a hundred bodily acts used by children, and this has been the basis of successful research. The list includes twenty-nine hand gestures. There are other ways of analysing hand movements, too, and McNeill and Levy (1982) used thirty-eight features in their study.

Another approach is simply to use the main categories of gesture used in a culture. We shall see later that in our own culture there are about eighty common emblems for example.

In decoding research the problem is to create the bodily movements to be decoded. In practice the ones used have been those which have consistently appeared in the encoding studies, to check that they have the same meaning to receivers as to senders. A related research design is to compare the information received by decoders with and without visual information.

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