Two Types of Disagreement in Group Discussions of

Authors: Etsuo Mizukami Ikuyo Morimoto Kana Suzuki Hiroko Otsuka Hideki Kashioka Satoshi Nakamura

Publish Date: 2009/01/10

Volume: 18, Issue: 3, Pages: 279-298

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Abstract

In this study we investigated the nature of disagreement which is a necessary component of a good discussion We obtained 27 group discussion scenes by Japanese undergraduates that were evaluated by two ways impression rating and ranking As a result of factor analysis for the impression rating data five factors were extracted activeness multidirection and unification of discussion relationships of participants development and sophistication of discussion and sincerity of the participants and each factor scores of each scene was simultaneously calculated Each scene’s rank score was also calculated by relative comparisons A significant positive correlation was found between the mean factor and the rank scores except for Factor 3 relationships of participants To consider the reason for the difference relating to Factor 3’s score we scrutinized the discussion process of four scenes of the different patterns of the factor and rank scores From the analysis of conversations we suggested that this difference reflected ways of disagreement By introducing a probative discourse tags for discussion pDTD we reasoned that the frequency of disagreement made Factor 3’s score negative and the absence of the second part of adjacency pairs made the rank score worse The explicit speech and actions of blame such as emotional and aggressive expression and neglect of treatment for the minor opinion made also the discussion unfair but we think that these behaviors might erupt from the ground made by the accumulated implicit behaviors such as the absence of the second part We finally concluded that the criticism type of disagreement increased the rank scores and its censure type produced lower results and the proper ways of disagreement in group discussions were discussed

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