Andrew Tran
SOC 110B – Clark
11 October 2015
Ursinus College
Paper One: Making the Familiar Strange
We often define our lives as human beings most in our everyday interactions with other people. Indeed, in one of our major readings this semester, Dalton Conley’s You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction To Thinking Like A Sociologist, he defines culture as all of our societal pressures that are acting on us (“everything but nature”) . Outside of very specific contexts, the notion of eye contact plays a large part in face-to-face interactions of people. There is even a field of study dedicated to the role of eye contact in communication called oculesics. I posit that on the Ursinus College campus, eye contact is valued positively, and …show more content…
In total, I collected two interviews with first-year students, two with sophomores, three with juniors, and three with seniors. Additionally, two of the juniors and one senior are international students, specifically from different parts of China/Hong Kong. Though this wasn’t necessarily to be a representation of the student body as a whole, I selected interviewees in such a way so as to account for the differences in experience between the classes, and hopefully draw conclusions as to the extent that eye contact plays into interactions on the campus.
The interview questions that I asked are as follows:
• Are you aware of your body movements while interacting with other people?
• Do you look people in the eye when you talk? Why/why not?
• Is this different with …show more content…
A refocusing of my thesis, even, to a study more focused on the international student on campus would also yield some interesting results. Most of my research background is in ethnography, and thus in qualitative research; I would also want to introduce more quantitative research, such as defining minimum (and possibly maximum) acceptable times for eye contact, and measuring breaks between bouts of eye contact as a way to include a different dimension to the data I gathered from
SOC 110B – Clark
11 October 2015
Ursinus College
Paper One: Making the Familiar Strange
We often define our lives as human beings most in our everyday interactions with other people. Indeed, in one of our major readings this semester, Dalton Conley’s You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction To Thinking Like A Sociologist, he defines culture as all of our societal pressures that are acting on us (“everything but nature”) . Outside of very specific contexts, the notion of eye contact plays a large part in face-to-face interactions of people. There is even a field of study dedicated to the role of eye contact in communication called oculesics. I posit that on the Ursinus College campus, eye contact is valued positively, and …show more content…
In total, I collected two interviews with first-year students, two with sophomores, three with juniors, and three with seniors. Additionally, two of the juniors and one senior are international students, specifically from different parts of China/Hong Kong. Though this wasn’t necessarily to be a representation of the student body as a whole, I selected interviewees in such a way so as to account for the differences in experience between the classes, and hopefully draw conclusions as to the extent that eye contact plays into interactions on the campus.
The interview questions that I asked are as follows:
• Are you aware of your body movements while interacting with other people?
• Do you look people in the eye when you talk? Why/why not?
• Is this different with …show more content…
A refocusing of my thesis, even, to a study more focused on the international student on campus would also yield some interesting results. Most of my research background is in ethnography, and thus in qualitative research; I would also want to introduce more quantitative research, such as defining minimum (and possibly maximum) acceptable times for eye contact, and measuring breaks between bouts of eye contact as a way to include a different dimension to the data I gathered from