Causal Attributions for Collaborative Public Speaking Presentations in College Classes

Abstract

The present study applied attribution theory in examining how college students interpret success and failure for themselves and their partners in collaborative presentations. Questionnaires were completed by 174 students based on a 2 (positive vs. negative feedback) × 2 (self vs. other) design. The results revealed that people who received positive feedback made similar attributions about themselves and their presentation partners. However, as predicted, people attributed their own poor performance less to internal causes and more to the nature of the assignment than they did their partners’ poor performance. Explanations of the findings and the implications for future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• Public Speaking
• Attributions
• Group Work

Notes

[1] Our review of literature turned up no other measure that specifically assessed attribution about public speaking performances. Our focus was not on constructing a measure of attributions about public speaking for general use; instead, we intended to derive items from a sample of the same population so as to ensure that the items would have face validity for participants. We did not employ a systematic coding system of the raw items, since in effect we were allowing our participants to determine how the items were conceptually grouped through the latent variables that emerged in the factor analyses.

[2] It was apparent based on the high number of ‘other’ classifications that our ethnicity labels were not clear to respondents. Of the 40 students who marked their ethnicity as ‘other,’ 8 wrote in ‘white,’ 2 ‘Caucasian,’ 7 ‘mixture,’ 5 ‘Filipino,’ 2 ‘Pacific Islander, and 1 each of ‘Greek,’ ‘Arab American,’ and ‘Mexican,’ while 8 left the line blank.

[3] Separate factor analyses for the positive and negative feedback conditions might have yielded factors with slightly different loadings; we computed them together so as to identify those core items on each factor that were consistent across both conditions, thus creating a uniform set of dependent variables for analyses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Li Luo

Li Luo (MA, California State University, Long Beach, 2004), Amy Bippus (PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 1999) is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies, and Norah Dunbar (PhD, University of Arizona, 2000), is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach.