The purpose of this paper is to analyze the social tension and critical thinking of a small decision making group, “Group E”, through a three category coding scheme, known as the Relational Control Modes category scheme, using arrows. Some of this essay will bring us back to previous coding schemes, relating to types of talk and participation, in order to give context to the discussion. The analytics of the discussion will help bring understanding to how specific interactions within the group effected each group member as well as how conflict presents itself in real world situations.
Methods
The group consisted of three females and one male, Breanna England, Jherica Rhaposa, Sophia Miller, and Noah Johnson which was named “Group E”. This group …show more content…
The up arrow is used to label a turn whenever a group member is seeking to control the conversation by asking a question or bringing up a topic to discuss, without necessarily answering a previous question. Down arrows suggest that the person is following the previous flow of conversation, answering questions or agreeing with members. When a group member is neither attempting to control the flow of conversation nor follow it, it is labeled with a side arrow. This includes when one makes observations about previous information, or acknowledging the answers of others. After labeling each turn with an arrow, we went through and circled each up-up couplet versus each couplet of people verbally reacting to other throughout the discussion. We circled these couplets and counted them on each page to find the number of up-up couples which occurred over time. Units used were couplets versus page number. Each time there was a couplet of two up arrows, the group labeled this as critical thinking, or ‘conflict’. There may have been slight disagreement, however this stood for change within the group, and keeping Group E from falling into ‘groupthink’, a hive-mind outlook that excludes differences in thinking. The critical thinking aspects of group communication while ridding the group of groupthink, enhances each members confidence in participation, allowing them to articulate their thoughts in a comfortable space, and ultimately add thoughtful information and insights to the decision making process. With this information, we created two graphs. One was a pie chart, outlining the amount of up-up couplets out of all 208 couplets, as well as a line graph showing the amount of critical thinking pairs per page