A New Metric for Assessing Group Level Participation in Fluid Teams

Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2009This presentation was part of the session : Methods, Measures, and DataThis material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. ©2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.Equality of participation is an important factor in the success of multidisciplinary science teams. The typical measure, standard deviation, fails to provide unbiased estimates across groups of different sizes or within groups that change size over time. We propose a new metric of participation equality that takes into account real-world teams that have members come and go naturally over the course of a meeting. This new metric ranges from zero (entirely equal participation) to one (entirely dominated by a single person). This metric is at the group level and for whatever period of time the researcher specifies. Using 11 hours of transcribed utterances from informal, fluid, co-located meetings during the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, we computed this metric for 549 blocks of time. We found that this metric had good convergent validity via having strong positive correlations with both a standard deviation metric of words spoken and participation equality as assessed by two independent coders. It also had good discriminant validity by being uncorrelated with positive and negative affect words, including anxiety and sadness words. Furthermore, when only fluid groups were examined, it maintained a strong correlation with coder-assessed participation. Future research can take advantage of this metric in other settings where team membership is fluid and equality of participation is of interest.National Science Foundatio

LEXICAL ENTRAINMENT AND SUCCESS IN STUDENT ENGINEERING GROUPS

Lexical entrainment is a measure of how the words that speakers use in a conversation become more similar over time. In this paper, we propose a measure of lexical entrainment for multi-party speaking situations. We apply this score to a corpus of student engineering groups using high-frequency words and project words, and investigate the relationship between lexical entrainment and group success on a class project. Our initial findings show that, using the entrainment score with project-related words, there is a significant difference between the lexical entrainment of high performing groups, which tended to increase with time, and the entrainment for low performing groups, which tended to decrease with time

Socializing the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System: incorporating social psychological phenomena into a Human Factors Error Classification System

Objective: The presence of social psychological pressures on pilot decision making was assessed using qualitative analyses of critical incident interviews. Background: Social psychological phenomena have long been known to influence attitudes and behavior but have not been highlighted in accident investigation models. Method: Using a critical incident method, 28 pilots who flew in Alaska were interviewed. The participants were asked to describe a situation involving weather when they were pilot in command and found their skills challenged. They were asked to describe the incident in detail but were not explicitly asked to identify social pressures. Pressures were extracted from transcripts in a bottom-up manner and then clustered into themes. Results: Of the 28 pilots, 16 described social psychological pressures on their decision making, specifically, informational social influence, the foot-in-the-door persuasion technique, normalization of deviance, and impression management and self-consistency motives. Conclusion: We believe accident and incident investigations can benefit from explicit inclusion of common social psychological pressures. Application: We recommend specific ways of incorporating these pressures into the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System

Emotions in Polish and Lithuanian Social Media

Teams of trained, native coders in Poland and Lithuania independently annotated 3,659 Polish and 1,946 Lithuanian Facebook posts (in-language and in-country) including all multimedia content but not the comments. These data were sampled from a larger dataset pulled from specific Polish and Lithuanian sociopolitical entities from 2015-2020. These annotations were on a 0 (none) to 100 (most frequent/intense) for each 23 emotions (and Positive and Negative Other) for each post. They were also rated for the personal reactions using the same emotion scheme for each post, but that data are not shared here. The annotators also coded each post for media type (e.g., text and what type vs. not, image vs. not), language, and primary and secondary topic, with topic coded using an adapted and expanded version of the Comparative Agenda’s Project’s scheme. These independent annotations went through a consensus process, and only the consensus numbers are deposited here. More detail about the sampling, consensus process, and other methodological details are available via emailing [email protected] for draft papers. This corpus also includes the number of Facebook shares and different Facebook reactions along with other useful information (e.g., name of account, link to post).We applied modern psychology theory of emotions and cross-cultural psychology methods to a range of issues surrounding emotions and social media. We developed an annotation guide for three languages and identified 365 Polish and 188 Lithuanian sociopolitical entities, and we developed a consensus annotated corpus for over 3,000 Polish and over 1,500 Lithuanian Facebook posts for emotional content, primary topic, post shares, and more. This corpus represents data we intend to have as sharable that was used in papers we hope to publish. More detail can be gained by reading the methodology description and by contacting the study PI, Susannah Paletz, at [email protected] of Naval Research / Minerva Research Initiative Grant number N00014-19-1-2506; Program Manager Dr. Rebecca Goolsb