ABSTRACT
Four decades ago, Bales and his colleagues (Bales, 1953; Bales, Strodtbeck, Mills, & Roseborough, 1951) observed the conversations of male groups who were discussing human relations problems. Two notable lines of inquiry emanated from this early work. One line of inquiry is built on Bales’ (1950) interaction process analysis, which captures the task-oriented and socioemotional content of speech acts. Among other things, this work explores the problem of maintaining a functional balance between task and social activities. This chapter focuses on the other line of inquiry, which is the modeling of participation rates among group members. Bales (1953) noted several striking regularities in the frequencies of initiating and receiving communications during face-to-face discussions. First and foremost, members of a group typically formed a hierarchy of participation. Second, this hierarchy was evident in speakers’ communications to specific individuals in the group but was even more pronounced for communications directed to the group as a whole. Third, the number of communications received by a member was highly correlated with the number of communications that he initiated.
