Need some homework help: an operational definition for gracefulness?

[Spoooon]

If you were going to measure gracefulness, what would you attempt to measure? Part of it depends on how you conceptually define grace. If you were defining grace as poise, you could see how well a person performs tasks under pressure. Any other ideas?

 

[Jfur]

I think of it in a communication sense. e.g., Can the person negotiate disagreements without offending the other and making them lose face?

 

[gopunk]

how about human perception? you could just have a panel of judges give their scores on "gracefulness"...

 

[Jfur]

<< how about human perception? you could just have a panel of judges give their scores on "gracefulness"... >>



exactly, have them watch different interactions

 

[Spoooon]

That's possible, but I can't really do that. The idea is to have perfect replicability and eliminate any possible bias. If you had a panel of reviewer, each person has their own opinion of what constitutes grace. Ideally, you'd want something like heart rate, etc, to measure. Something that is concrete and not up to human interpretation. That's why I was leaning toward the poise idea. You could give someone a set of tasks and see how well they perform under pressure. You could monitor heart rate etc and see how cool they are, sort of a grace under fire sort of thing.

 

[gopunk]

i don't think grace and reliability are one and the same necessarily. and reliability is basically what you're testing for when you do the pressure test.

i think this is going to be hard, because i feel grace is objective to begin with.

 

[Spoooon]

<< I think this is going to be hard, because i feel grace is objective to begin with. >>


I agree. It depends on what your conceptual definition is. Here's Webster's:

displaying grace in form or action: pleasing or attractive in line, proportion, or movement

I suppose one could simply measure the length and width of various body parts and see how proportional the person is. That's seems too simple, but it may be the only way to go that isn't objective.

 

[gopunk]

I agree. It depends on what your conceptual definition is. Here's Webster's:

displaying grace in form or action: pleasing or attractive in line, proportion, or movement

I suppose one could simply measure the length and width of various body parts and see how proportional the person is. That's seems too simple, but it may be the only way to go that isn't objective.

well you could measure proportion, but it wouldn't be exactly objective, because you would still have to decide on which proportions were pleasing or attractive.

 

[Spoooon]

<< well you could measure proportion, but it wouldn't be exactly objective, because you would still have to decide on which proportions were pleasing or attractive. >>


That's true, but I think we can agree on what proportions are attractive.

 

[Jfur]

I agree that there is simply no way to objectively measure grace. You would have to tie ot to some measure and define it as such. But that seems forced. May I ask why you are doing this -- and was grace chosen as a variable by or for you?

 

<< If you were going to measure gracefulness, what would you attempt to measure? >>



One's ability to get others to do their homework for them. That takes grace.

 

[Spoooon]

It's my psychology homework. We have a list of concepts to operationally define. The definition must be specified in great enough detail so that another researcher could literally replicate or clone the operation or procedure. The concepts: friendliness, aggression, attention, gracefulness, intelligence, fatigue, and memory.
My answer for friendliness:

I define friendliness as the length of a participant's smile when engaged in conversation, the number of times the participant smiles when engaged in conversation, and the number of details the participant remembers from said conversation. To measure friendliness, I would have participants engage each other conversation. I would record the lengths of each participant's smiles, the number of times each participant smiles, and then quiz each participant about particulars from the conversation.

I'm just asking for a little help here, not a write up for my homework.

 

[Jfur]

ok, since you are not actually going to DO a study based on this, I think you could use the rough definition of "not clumsy" -- you could then go with the age-old "test" of grace involving things like balanceing books or teacups on one's head while walking (and not spilling)
Have young ladies walk back and forth across the room with a bowl if beer on their heads and measure how much each spills

I am only teasing a bit, because this is probably as close as one could get to operationaling grace of movement... and people really did do these things to develop/display "grace" in years past...

 

[Spoooon]

JFur, you da man! Or whatever. That's a good idea. Gracefulness was the only tough one on the list. Everything else was pretty elementary. Thanks for the help.

 

[beatniks3]

if this is for psychology, what not use a word association test? Measure the reaction time of patients after they hear a word and pair it with a word of their own. Start off with non-offensive words to get some kind of standard, then start using certain 'naughty' words. Gracefulness involves taking things in stride; for some patients there would be a more noticable time difference between the 'naughty' word being said and their response word...this model could be extended to also included offensive subjects, pictures, etc...hope this helps...