an open university blog (not official!)

As part of the course DT840 – “Introduction to Research: basic skills and survey methods” – one of the tasks we carried out was to come up with a research proposal on a topic of our choice, revise the proposal, design the study methodology (some sort of survey method… a la the name of the course!), come up with the “fieldwork” material (interviewer instructions, questionnaire, etc as relevant) and write about how the study would actually be carried out i.e. number of participants, sampling method, how the data will be analysed etc… The course does not involve actually carrying out the project itself, more the planning stages, but I think it would be good preparation for the research methods dissertation, in which I believe a project is carried out and then the results written up.

I went through quite a few ideas and alternative versions before deciding on the topic of my proposal/plan (which eventually related to motivations etc for young people choosing distance learning rather than ‘traditional’ university – without going into too much boring detail!). One of the ideas I considered was the influence of ‘typography’ on the perception of the writer by the person reading the document. The idea didn’t get planned in that much detail but would have been along the lines of obtaining suitable text (from where?), creating versions in several different typographical styles based on a review of research literature about readability, what is the best font to use for clarity of web vs print etc, and asking research participants to read the texts and then based on their ‘impression’ of the writer, to answer what they thought about the writer such as whether they are male/female, successful/unsuccessful etc, for various different traits (traits decided on from the research literature into personality etc) and analyse the data to find out whether particular fonts/styles have a “statistically significant” effect on the perception of the writer.

However although I have always thought this was a good subject for research I never got any further or put the ideas down in a similar form!

Having a look today a study on a similar subject has been done here:

The Effect of Typeface on the Perception of Email
A. Dawn Shaikh, Doug Fox, Barbara S. Chaparro
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/91/POF.html

The write-up has some interesting conclusions, in brief that based on the data collected, the choice of typeface does seem to have a significant effect on the perception of the writer, for certain traits.

I was thinking about this topic in relation to our TMAs. For relatively ‘factual’ subjects such as programming, the marks for the answer depend on whether the code works and (if required) whether the coding ‘conventions’ required by the course have been used i.e. there are marks for style (on certain criteria) as well as the code actually working. However in more ‘subjective’ subjects (in some sense) such as literature, philosophy, history and actually most ‘arts’ subjects I wonder whether the font chosen by the student does affect the result in some way? Obviously “choice of font” is not a real criterion to grade essays on but based on some of this research I wonder whether there is a factor at work where essays in particular fonts are perceived as more ‘authoritative’ (or whatever) than they would be if written in a different font?

Clearly this would not apply only at the OU, but anywhere written work is produced and marked!

(I must admit that my TMAs for quite a few of the courses for the BA(Hons) were written in Comic Sans… Garamond for the masters level courses and Arial for the technology short courses (robotics and internet, law and society) and the programming and interaction design courses, also will be for M366 when it starts. Does this say more about choice of typeface to reflect the perception of the subject?!)