Hi everyone. I plan to investigate students' politeness based on Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory. However, I haven't found yet, how to measure their level of politeness. Is there any grading criteria or coding scheme for this measurement in the related articles? Thank you
Dear Darmawansah, in case you don't find an existing instrument, you could easily turn the features that make up "politeness" in Brown and Levinson's (1987) into single items that need to be rated by outside raters on a scale from 1 (i.e., not present) - 4 (i.e., fully present). The average across all items will then give you a measure of the students' politeness in their utterances. Here, I am assuming that the items "work together well" in the sense of Cronbach's Alpha and that raters agree in their judgement, both of which would need to be checked beforehand.
Dear Darmawansah, Based on personal experience as a teacher in the university. You can design questionnaire with items on students' politeness as regards exhibited polite behaviors expected of them. For instance, 'do you make greetings when you meet people'- it depends on the response key you want use. It may be 'yes' or 'no' or 'agree' 'disagree' or free response. Best regards
Politeness can be heartfelt or merely pro forma, sincere or insincere, well-meant or ironical — lots of factors to be distinguished. This article might be helpful: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1126942.pdf
However, I think you will need to explicitly articulate and zero in on a specific and narrow conception of politeness; otherwise your study will be compromised by multiple ambiguities.
I assume you mean that Brown and Levinson (1987: 76) created an equation to measure the degree to which a speech act is threatening to the image:
Wx = D (S, U) + P (U, S) + Rx
Where w= weightiness, D= distance, S= speaker, H= hearer, P= power, R= rank
As Andreas Wirag has explained, "you could easily turn the features that make up "politeness" in Brown and Levinson's (1987) into single items".
On the other hand, there are studies on politeness in intercultural mediation in which these variables are applied. In this way, the previous variables are defined first, such as, e.g., social distance (D) in English/Spanish culture or power regarding each of these societies (P). The last variable (P) could be expressed by money in each society, although other factors could also be considered.
Finally, a further option could be to measure the frequency of use of certain categories of words (adjectives, nouns, etc.) in students' texts, which would lead us to use Python. I attach this link which explains how to calculate this frequency:Article Counting Word Frequencies with Python
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Medicine
- Epi
- Age Groups
- Children