Communicating on Thanksgiving

Did you do a lot of communicating yesterday? If you were like me, you probably went to a family gathering and got to talk to people you don't talk to all that often. In my case, we all met at my sister Chris's house. She is the perfect hostess and multi-tasker. If you ever need any event planned and need it to occur on time--flawlessly--contact my sister! Can this gal communicate!

There to help her, was the other great cook in the family. No, as you may well know, not me--but my culinary brother Ken. He brought several fantastic side dishes to add to Chris's already immaculate table. Here he is in the photograph whipping up his famous turkey gravy. Ken communicates beautifully with his mastery of all things edible. I'm still nibbling on his wonderful bacon scones!

Another family member I was delighted to see was my amazing son Alex. Alex arrived AFTER he ran a local race at 8:00 in the morning along with Chris's oldest son Nick and his wife Kristin. Obviously the three of them did not need to feel guilty about eating a huge turkey meal. As you can see from this photograph I took of Alex yesterday and an old one I have of him from several years ago, Alex is a major inspiration to me. He has transformed his life--losing a huge amount of weight through diet and exercise (in his case, marathon running). He was giving all of us dieters in the group yesterday, some much needed motivation communication. Thanks, Alex!

Probably, the most enjoyable conversation I had yesterday, was a private interaction with Brennan, the four-month-old son of Nick and Kristin. If you think it's not possible to communicate with an infant this young, you would be wrong. Of course, our communication was nonverbal, but it occurred. Brennan's eyes are wide open and observing everything; he responds to my face and my voice. I experimented with different facial expressions and voices to see what sort of reaction I might get. That's Brennan with his mom in the photograph.

Meltzoff and Moore conducted some interesting studies on infant communication with children much younger than Brennan. Nick and Kris (and you, if you are a parent of an infant--or a grandparent) might like to test out their hypotheses. They had adults present three different facial expressions to infants (some as young as 12 days old): tongue protrusion, mouth opening, and lip protrusion. They found that the infants produced the facial expressions that the adults displayed. In a variation of this basic experiment, they then had a new adult (one the infant didn't know) present a totally new facial expression to the infant (they recommend a tongue protrusion to the side--like sticking out your tongue and touching your cheek) and then having the new adult return the next day with a neutral face. They found that in most cases, the infant would produce the new facial expression for the new adult. It was almost as if the infant associated the new expression with the new adult--like "you're the "stick out your tongue and touch your cheek guy." Although Meltzoff and Moore didn't investigate infants' imitation of sound, I encourage new parents to incorporate sound and sound effects into their repertoire of tricks in communicating with babies. This probably stems from my own vocalics research. We know that babies' hearing is as good--if not better--than their sight, and babies are great at making sounds--particularly the raspberry!

All in all, I had a wonderful Thanksgiving and managed some great communication. How about you?

Number of Comments--Please Answer This Poll

Before we leave the topic of what factor about a blog post most encourages readers to post comments, let's open the floor to your input. From my little mini-content analysis of twenty of my most recent posts that I described in my last post, I determined that post length had no significant effect on the number of comments received. Several readers suggested alternative reasons why one blog post might receive more comments than another.

I've incorporated their ideas into this little poll that you will find on my right sidebar. Please participate in the poll and I'll report your answers next week. Thanks!

(graphic from www.jillstanek.com)

Christmas Card Communication

Christmas cards bedecked our living room when I was a child. They arrived in the mail by the dozens, starting soon after Thanksgiving and my mother immediately hung them from the mantel or around doorways. These multi-colored greetings were a major part of holiday decoration at our house. Some showcased funny cartoon Santas; others had beautifully painted religious scenes. Some enclosed a simple signature and others held lengthy messages from a faraway friend. Some even included typed pages of a family's yearly exploits. There were literally hundreds of them all over the house and my amazing mother kept track of every one and saw to it that all were recorded and reciprocated.

As a Communication researcher, I view the sending and receiving of Christmas cards as a form of communication. Not considering the religious significance of Christmas cards, from a communication standpoint alone, the exchange of these little messages of love is a wonderful tradition that seems to be waning. Possibly this is because of our hectic lifestyle or more efficient technology which allows instant communication, but whatever the reason, fewer and fewer of us seem to send Christmas cards.

How about you? Do you send Christmas cards? If so, do you write messages in them or include a typed insert about your experiences? Do you receive many Christmas cards? Do you think the practice of sending of Christmas cards is declining?

(photo from www.global-b2b.network.com)

Let's Test This Hypothesis: Longer Posts Relate to Fewer Comments

In my last post, I indicated that I tend to believe that longer blog posts will receive fewer comments. If I were still working as an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, conducting research on various communication-related topics, I might very well have decided to test this hypothesis for one of my studies. Actually, it would be relatively easy to do.

When one variable (in this case, the number of comments) changes in a particular way when another variable (in this case, the length of the blog post) changes, we call this a correlation. Determining the correlation between two variables is accomplished with a simple statistical test. If the correlation is perfect (that is, 100%), it would mean that as the length of the blog post increased, we would see a comparable decrease in the number of comments. (Actually, our example is an inverse or indirect correlation because we are suggesting that as one variable increases the other decreases). Hardly ever do things change so precisely in real life, so in most cases, the correlation will be much less than 1.0 or perfect. The less the actual correlation statistic (it can be anything from 1.00 to -1.00) is, the less likely that there is a relationship between the variables --in our case, length and number of comments.

So, let's try it. Here's how I'm going about it. First, I need a random sample. The best random sample would be to take several examples of blogs from a number of sources and tabulate their lengths and the number of comments for each. For this little pretend project, I'm just going to take a few examples from this blog and tabulate the lengths and the number of comments and see what the correlation is. Yes, I understand that my sample is not truly random, but this is a demonstration, so bear with me.

I selected the most recent 20 posts from Communication Exchange. I counted the number of words in each post and the comparable number of comments for each. Here are the results:

Words in Post/Number of Comments

20/ 7

537/0

273 / 7

531 / 1

317 / 2

344 / 1

325 / 3

317 / 4

186 / 3

27 / 0

203/ 3

321 / 1

264 / 3

443 / 4

146 / 5

257 / 1

366 / 2

391 / 2

485 / 1

159 / 2

Now I merely submit these data to one of the many online statistical testing sites (my favorite is Stat Pages). I quickly discover that there is NO significant correlation (the correlation is -.39, the significance level being only .08). So, what does that mean? From our little test, it appears that post length and number of comments are NOT meaningfully correlated. So, fear not, long-winded bloggers--you have just as much chance at getting comments as anyone else! What do you say to that?

(graphics from iannoon.wordpress.com)