Ken's+Script

In this article, participants were 105 Foreign Language and Early Childhood Care and Education program undergraduates from a Taiwan university. Screening was done to ensure computer literacy, and that none of the people knew each other. Participants were divided into 21 groups of 5 individuals.

Their task: Describe how to reduce the risk of online shopping fraud, the relationship between IC cards and e-shopping, how do IC cards affect online transactions, and how will it affect the implementation of e-government.

According to the article, this problem was outside their areas of expertise. Participants had four weeks to complete this assignment, using email for communication. Over half the participants had jobs during the day, and could only work on this assignment in the evening.

Primary quantitative data for this study was a subset of the 2546 emails generated by the 21 groups during their four weeks of work. Emails were analyzed and categorized by purpose, form, linguistic features, sender and recipient. Further categorization into 9 genres was done by determining if emails possessed specific combinations of purpose, form, and linguistic features. Communication network structure was determined by analyzing sender and recipient information.

A communication genre is a communication form (in this instance, an email message with a specific combination of purpose, form, and linguistic features) adopted by a community, using the communication medium (in this instance, email) in a similar way, for a similar purpose. (1)

Communication network structure is a combination of betweenness (the number of people between you and the information) and density (the number of messages exchanged between participants).

After group work completion, qualitative data was collected with a questionnaire examining participant perception of task, relationship, and process conflict.

1. http://blog.timebarrow.com/2010/03/communication-genre/