Email Etiquette

Research Question
Conversations can be divided into three segments: an entry where two people agree and coordinate the commencement of a conversation, the body where the participants discuss one or more topics, and the closing where all conversation partners agree to close the conversation. In asynchronous conversation mediums such as email, conversation boundaries can become blurred when one full conversation can be composed of a number of discrete messages that themselves can be made up of an entry, body, and closing. We are interested in how the composition of the individual messages changes over time in a prolonged email exchange. More specifically, how do people alter their greetings and signatures within prolonged email exchanges?

We hypothesize that greetings and signatures will be altered to mirror conversation partners within prolonged email exchanges. In order to test our hypothesis we have designed an experiment where we will track a thread of emails between one subject and one confederate in two conditions, and two subjects in the third condition. Regardless of condition, each pair will be given a task, which they must complete through email.

Condition One
The subject, an undergraduate, will be given a task and a partner (the confederate who they are told is also an undergraduate) to complete the task with. The subject must initiate the email conversation, but after that, anyone can write at any time. In this condition the confederate will stop using greetings and signatures on the third email that he/she sends.

Condition Two
The setup and participants are the same as in condition one, however in this condition the confederate will use greetings and signatures throughout the exchange.

Condition Three
In this condition both subjects will be undergraduates. They will be given the same task and told to complete it via email.

Further, we hypothesize that the first message from each partner will include a formal greeting and introduction, as the partners do not know each other. In condition one we hypothesize that once the confederate changes his or her entry method, the subject will follow in order to take part of the joint project. In the second condition, where the confederate continues to keep the entries and exits formal, we hypothesize that the subject will do the same in order to be polite.

After collecting the dialogues, we will throw out any dialogues with less than six discrete messages and those that took longer than 2 days from start to finish. After reviewing the transcripts we will make a determination as to what constitutes a greeting and a signature within a message. We will then code all of the resulting greetings and signatures on measures such as length and formality. Finally, we will use our coded data to observe patterns in the greetings and signatures of conversations between conditions.