Pragmatic skills are important in day to day lives of individuals as they are one of the ways that determine how individuals interact with others. Also, they are what determines how individuals communicate their ideas, personal thoughts, and feelings (Stanton-Chapman, Jamison and Denning 226). The skills include what people say to others, how they say those things, their body language among other things. Those who have poor pragmatic skills may find it difficult to interpret the intention of other people's communication correctly hence resulting to them having a hard time responding either verbally or non-verbally. As a result of the importance of pragmatic skills in the communication process, I would want to study pragmatic skills of different groups of people in the society.
The exact question of the research would be pragmatic skills of outgoing versus shy people. The means that the study is going to use experiments. These experiments would be in a selected group of individuals and adhering to the four elements that a true experiment should have. The four elements are a random selection, manipulation, control and random assignment (Montgomery 12). The two elements of importance are manipulation and control as they would be able to minimize errors and biases greatly. Random selection and random assignment will ensure that participants in the experiment have an equal chance of getting into the experimental groups and receive equal treatment as others.
In carrying out the experiment, I expect to find that outgoing people have better pragmatic skills than shy people. The reason for this is that many shy people seem to have a difficulty connecting with other people. Though this is the case, shy people may have an edge in certain areas of pragmatic skills such as fewer interruptions during communication. Other details will become evident from a true experiment adhering to all rules.
There is a need to find an appropriate method to collect data. Hence, this experiment will use quantitative data collection methods such as observation and interviews. The methods will be efficient as they will be time-saving and it may be easier to target a larger population (Creswell 5). The subjects of the study will be students from various secondary schools. The reason for this is that schools normally contain a wide variety of people from different backgrounds hence providing an easier time to find participants.
The research of finding out the pragmatic skills of outgoing and shy people is important is it would enable researchers to know what factors causes a difference in people’s pragmatic skills and how to improve these skills over time. The prediction is that the outcome of the experiment will show that outgoing people have better pragmatic skills in a wide range of settings as compared to shy people. However, shy people may have better skills in some aspects such as non-interruption of conversations. With the necessary tools and environment, the study will prove to be a success and may even offer assistance in the development of pragmatic skills of certain people.
Works Cited
Creswell, John W. Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage Publications, 2013.
Montgomery, Douglas C. Design and analysis of experiments. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
Stanton-Chapman, T. L., K. R. Jamison, and C. B. Denning. "Teaching social pragmatic skills to young children at-risk." Early Childhood Services: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Effectiveness 2.2 (2008): 225-251.
