The isolation and interpretation of kinesic responses to music to determine "like" and "dislike" attitudes

Current research in nonverbal communication theory contends that behaviors often reflect attitudes. An unquestioned cultural truism supports this contention, since people often infer attitudes on the bases of others' behaviors. These two ideas served as basic assumptions for investigating whether or not subjects use predetermined attitudinally-relevant behaviors to display attitudes toward music, and whether or not the use of those behaviors allow observers to interpret correctly subjects' attitudes.

The primary means and procedures used in data gathering for this study involved preassessment and follow-up questionnaires, personal interviews, and unobtrusive videotaping and coding of subjects' nonverbal responses to music. Albert Mehrabian's metaphors of immediacy and responsiveness in nonverbal communication research provided guidelines for the selection and analysis of variables. Computer-based descriptive and Pearson product moment correlation analyses were used to compile and draw conclusions from the data.

The major findings of the research were that, though the predetermined attitudinally-relevant behaviors were displayed in response to the music, these behaviors held no significant relationship to the subjects' stated attitudes. The findings also indicated that there was a strong relationship for two out of three cases between the variables of observers' inferences about attitudes and the subjects' levels of total positive responsiveness. In all cases, however, there was no significant relationship between observers' inferences and subjects' stated attitudes. Therefore, the overall findings of the study were negative. Interpretations of the results are limited, however, to the constraints placed upon the study through the use of unsophisticated self-report measures to gain attitude statements.

The analysis of the data also demonstrated that there was a problem with the internal validity of the study. The methodology required that treatment selections be drawn from the sample's most and least preferred categories of music. The selections used in the research were drawn from categories defined by conventional definitions (i.e., opera, classical, rock, jazz, soul, folk, country and western, and religious). Results indicated that the subjects' perceptions of music categories differed from conventional definitions of the genres, thus weakening the internal validity of the research.

The laboratory setting used to videotape subjects' responses to music limited the research findings due to the obtrusiveness of the one-way observation mirror. In order to gain greater reliability within the results, future research should attempt to replicate this study using a setting which allows for the observation of subjects' responses to music under less obtrusive circumstances.

Suggestions for reducing the limitations of the methodology are provided in the last chapter. Also discussed are the implications this research holds for the areas of attitude measurement, nonverbal communication theory, and marketing research techniques within the music industry.