A2 Coursework info for today's lesson

Now that you have evaluated your data to ensure that it is the right data (enough data, selected reliably etc.), you need to make sure you have done enough theory reading to get a hypothesis (or two or three hypotheses).

A hypothesis should be based on your understanding of what you might expect from your data, based on your theory reading. It should be in the form of a declarative that reflects a theory/research (even if that is not actually what you believe you are going to find!). You will test the hypothesis with your data and it is just as interesting to find the opposite rather than 'prove' your hypothesis.

While we are on the subject of proving/disproving, I must state categorically that you must not do either! You should evaluate how far hypotheses are supported or contraditcted based on what you find and how representative your data is. This should happen all the way through your analysis - 'evaluate' is one of the key criteria and you have already begun to hit it in your methodologies; you must also evaluate how far the data supports research in your analysis.

Please post your hypothesis as a declarative (statement) onto your blog and add underneath which frameworks/techniques you will be exploring to test it. E.g. if I were looking at a group of students (males and females) doing two different tasks (co-operative and competetive), I could use Deborah Tannen's Difference theory to hypothesise that 'no matter which task they are undertaking, males will be use more competetive language and women will use more co-operative language'. I would then need to look at some key techniques that I was initially identifying as either 'competetive' or 'co-operative' (I would evaluate whether that was actually the case in context during my analysis) e.g. interrruptions and imperatives (these could be quantified) as competetive and interrogatives and back-channel agreement as co-operative). I could also look at Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies to help me to talk about techniques used, so a secondary hypothesis might be 'therefore, men will use more on-record and positive face strategies while women will use more negative face and indirect strategies.' I could see what I find before I decide what would be useful to quantify in proving (supporting!) or disproving (contradicting!) that. I suspect that all the sentence moods would be very important. I know I could link to (and evaluate the usefulness of the flawed study by) Zimmerman and West when discussing the data, and also Tannen's other pairs (e.g. status vs support) so I could be confident of a good range of theory to help me test my data (and show off to the coursework marker/moderators). I would also have plenty to choose from when deciding what to write about in my media text (so keep that in mind).

Only when you are sure you know what your research tells you should you start analysing your data properly, so you know what to look for and comment on and you can link it all back to your hypothesis throughout, creating a cohesive analysis.

Please also check the coursework booklet for the overview of how the sections of the coursework break down. Your analysis can be broken up under framework headings, questions, techniques you are focussing on or any other way of helping to get a methodical structure that helps the reader see your scientific process in analysing your data.

Start your analysis when you are confident you are ready.

Good luck!