This tweet showed multimodality and the fact that it is written in capitals means that you don't necessarily have to read the tweet as the capitals attract your attention and show that it is important. The emojis are used to show his emotion- the 3 party images are used for celebration which we know means that something good/successful has happened.
For my investigation I decided to look at gender theories as I think there is more to talk about and it is relevant and interesting to find in most conversations. My hypothesis was 'Men are more dominant as they are straight to the point whereas women waffle', I was also looking for emotive language between the two genders I was doing this by looking at the length of the tweets.
For my methodology I chose to look at every third tweet to ensure that there were no anomalies and to make it more reliable as I wouldn't be cherry picking the tweets. The two people that I chose to look at were Ed Miliband and Amy Childs.
I made a chart which showed the different features and what I found in both of the genders over a total of 10 tweets for men and 10 tweets for women totalling to 20 tweets altogether.
|
Feature
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Men
|
Women
|
|
Emojis
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0
|
12
|
|
Emotive language
|
13
|
7
|
|
Sentence length
|
Average: 20.1
Range: 16-27
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Average: 9.2
Range: 3-17
|
|
Hashtags
|
1
|
10
|
In my analysis I found that my findings do not support my hypothesis. This is primarily because of the choice of people that I chose to look at. Ed Miliband is an mp whereas Amy Childs is from a reality television show. It is interesting though in the fact that Ed uses more emotive language where we would expect Amy to as she is the woman, although this is because at the time when the tweets were posted it was nearing the general election where Ed needed to gain votes from the public whereas Amy does not.
Reflecting on the data sources I have found that they were ill judged as they are from different backgrounds, therefore this meant that I was a constraint and disproved my hypothesis.
In the next investigation I will make sure that I chose my sources from similar/ the same backgrounds, similar ages, same status and same profession to ensure that the data will support my hypothesis
Good - you have seen that you need more comparability factors before you can test the effect of gender and that it is more than just who you choose, it is what is happening to them contextually (e.g. the election will have likely meant unrepresentative data for Miliband). While you can't always control that, often you can by careful selection of subjects and you must talk about this in your methodology. Also show awareness of the need to decide carefully what constitutes 'emotive language' in a measurable, comparable way - you could find a researcher who has established what they found to be the predominant techniques for affecting the emotions of an audience and use all/some of those or you could try and establish what you think they are by closely analysing some sample data (do some pre-research) - your sample data would need to be similar to, but not the same as, the real data you will collect. In your real investigation, you would need to see what else you found that wasn't on the list of techniques you went in looking for and talk about their effects too.
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