Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Page 158

Vanessa Isenmann:
I presented the matched-guise test first as the study on people’s attitudes
toward informal digital writing practices formed that backdrop against
which I studied people’s actual digital practices. Also, chronologically, the
study on people’s attitudes came before the analysis of Icelandic Facebook
data. All of this was mirrored in the structure of the thesis.

In this test, 211 informants responded to two different versions of an advertise-
ment from a person looking for a flat. They were told that this was a marketing
survey for the rental market. One version is written in a formal style, but the sec-
ond one includes details that are typical for computer-mediated communication.
The informal text includes features such as colloquialisms, slang, abbreviations,
and emojis. The informants were then asked to rate the authors of these texts on
different scales to measure their unconscious attitudes.
In your analysis, you look at the answers based on social variables such as
gender, age, and education. Your results indicate that the biggest difference can
be seen when we look at the variable education. The group that only completed
elementary school is the only group that would rather let their apartment to the
person who wrote the informal text than to the person who used standard lan-
guage. When you looked at age, the informants in the oldest category were also
more willing to rent the apartment to the person who wrote the informal guise
text than the younger groups. You mention in the thesis that this is somehow
contradictory to previous research, because younger people have been more pos-
itive toward computer-mediated communication than the older generations. So
my question is this:
Could a multi-variable analysis shed a different light on the data, e.g. by look-
ing at age and education together?

Vanessa Isenmann:
In fact, I did do that, but my research sample was too small to make any
valuable statements. I did look, for example, into the correlations between
age and education. I found, for example, that the informants with a BA/BS
degree were the most negative toward the informal guise whereas infor-
mants with a MA/MS degree were more positive toward the informal
guise. When I looked at the relationship between age and education, I found
that informants with a BA/BS degree were proportionally best represented
in the youngest age group. This group was also more negative toward the
informal guise as opposed to the oldest age group that was the most positive
toward the informal guise. At the same time, there was a correlation
between the oldest age group and informants with a MA/MS degree. One
explanation that I came up with was that the informants with a BA/BS
degree were still quite young and therefore probably still competing on the
Helga Hilmisdóttir158