COMMENT ON "THE DISTRIBUTION OF PARTICIPATION IN GROUP DISCUSSIONS IN GROUP DISCUSSIONS" AS RELATED TO GROUP SIZE.

The article presents comments of the author on the article "Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups," by Robert Freed Bales. Bales was the first to examine, in a major program of research, the characteristics of interaction in face-to-face groups. His procedure was to hire college students needing part-time work and ask them to discuss ambiguous problems while trained observers recorded the initiator, recipient, and content of each act, or intragroup communication. By using two observers and comparing their records, Bales hoped to measure shared, transmittable characteristics of these groups. One of the earliest analyses focused on the relationship between the initiator and recipient of the acts occurring in these face-to-face groups. An important finding was that the rank ordering of the group members with respect to the volume of acts initiated correlated perfectly with the rank ordering of the group members with respect to the volume of acts received. He also gave some attention to the general form of the initiation hierarchy in different sized groups, presented on charts showing the percentage of acts initiated by the group members occupying each initiation rank. Bales then attempted to develop a formula that would fit these points in interaction hierarchies in groups of size 2 through 84. His finding was that the agreement between the harmonic distribution and the data, as presented, was unacceptable.