Live Session Agenda

A typical Week 6 agenda:

  1. 15 min: Lobby
  2. 25 min: Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (2014)
  3. 20 min: Panger (2014)
  4. 20 min: Group Consultations: Private Memos
  5. 05 min: Next Week On, RDADAs of Our Lives…

1. Lobby: Warm-up

Take 15 minutes to answer the following questions. While waiting in the lobby students should browse the Google search results and get a sense of the range of estimates “current” on the Internet.

The instructor should break students into next week’s project teams as they arrive, for use later.

You have 10 minutes to resolve the problem, “How long should our presentation be?”, by answering the research question, “How many minutes is the attention span of adults?”. This is not enough time to run your own experiment, so you will have to conduct a secondary analysis. Let your sample of priors be drawn from the first page of the following Google search results:

https://www.google.com/search?q=adult+attention+span+ideal+length+of+presentation

  1. What is the range of estimates of attention span that you draw?
  2. Does the answer to the RQ solve the problem?
    • If so, how long should your presentation be? If not:
      • Is the RQ sound?
      • What’s the next step in getting to a solution?
  3. How confident do you feel about your decision?
    • What if anything do you make of the Jan 29, 2016 PolicyViz blog post?
    • Why do you think the PolicyViz post’s pagerank is lower than some of the others?

2. Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (2014)

Take 25 minutes to follow the questions at a comfortable pace. If time runs out early, stop and skip to the next activity.

  1. Characterize the following elements of the “Facebook Experiment”:
    • ontology6
    • RQ,
    • method,
    • results, and
    • findings.
  2. Which of Creswell’s “worldviews” do you think best describes Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (2014)? Why?
  3. Study the plot.
    • Is this a good visualization?
    • What would you change and why?

3. Panger (2014)

Take 20 minutes to follow the questions at a comfortable pace. If time runs out early, stop and skip to the next activity.

  1. In which corner of the accuracy/precision matrix would you place Panger’s (2014) critique of Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (2014)?
    • Where do you think Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (2014) would place themselves?
  2. Which of Creswell’s “worldviews” do you think best describes Panger (2014)? Why?
  3. Which elements of the design of Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (2014) does Panger accept, and which does he criticize?
    • ontology
    • RQ
    • method
    • results
    • findings
  4. Think of Steve’s advice about what makes for a good RQ.
    • Do either Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (2014) or Panger (2014) ask a “beautiful question”?
  5. Ultimately, how useful was the Facebook Experiment?
    • If it depends on who you ask, time for group consultations!

4. Group Consultations: Private Memos

Take 20 minutes for coworking and consultation time in team breakout groups. The instructor should visit each team for 5 minutes, and otherwise students should be coworking to prep for next week’s presentation. Students should discuss the conversation they had around the memo.

Memos can be found here, and students should upload a pdf or screenshare the memo when they enter the breakout.

Think of questions that the instructo can help you with. Do not ask the instructor for advice about the format. It doesn’t matter; it is a formative document to help you get into character and see the problem from a particular perspective.


readings (links) & lectures ～ assignments due

Bibliography

Kramer, Adam D. I., Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. 2014. “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (24): 8788–90. doi:10.1073/pnas.1320040111.

Panger, Galen. 2014. “Why the Facebook Experiment Is Lousy Social Science.” Medium. https://medium.com/@gpanger/why-the-facebook-experiment-is-lousy-social-science-8083cbef3aee.

  1. In a nutshell, the basic assumption about what the “thing” being studied “is”. See unit of analysis and conceptualization under DSM Research Design.↩