Latrinalia - bathroom wall writing
An undergraduate, Raina Williams, was interested
in finding out the content of graffiti in women's restrooms. She made a
comprehensive study of graffiti found in all of the women's rooms on the
campus of a west coast university. Here is her procedure and findings:
1. Collect data
Visit all of the women's restrooms on campus
and write down every graffiti statement on a 3x5 index card. On
the back of the card indicate date and location. |
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2. Develop coding categories
After looking over the statements, she had
to make a decision as to whether to treat each line of graffiti
as a unit, or to treat a series (the give-and-take sequence of
comments) as a single unit. She decided on the second approach,
and referred to these as "conversations." If there was
only a single line of graffiti, that also became a "conversation."
She developed a comprehensive set of mutually-exclusive (non-overlapping) categories
into which each conversation could be sorted. The categories are listed in
Figure 1. |
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3. Code data into categories
She classified each conversation into the
category that best fit its overall sense. She used "Misc" for
those that didn't fit anywhere else. |
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4. Reliability check
She recruited another student to independently
classify the statements into the categories. Then they met,
resolved the ambiguities, and rechecked their level of agreement. |
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| 5. Results |
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The results of the topic themes are shown
in Figure 1. Sex and relationships, followed by drugs,
were the most frequently-occurring topics.
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Raina also categorized the emotional tone of the
conversations, following the same procedure as above. Those results are
shown in Figure 2. Most of the graffiti had a neutral emotional tone, although
nearly 40 percent were negative.
Figure 1. Percentage of graffiti "conversations"
falling into each of the listed categories. |
Figure 2. Percentage of graffiti "conversations" falling
into each emotional tone category. |
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