For this assignment, two individuals went through the ten most recent e-mails of all five members of Team 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team, coding for both ideas and euphemisms in the text. In order to successfully code, both coders individually looked at every email, and broke them down into ideas. Once both coders were in agreement about how many ideas an e-mail contained, the two then separately rated each idea with either a “0” (meaning the idea contained no euphemism) or a “1” (meaning the idea contained at least one euphemism).
Upon completion of this exercise, both coders then constructed a “confusion matrix” that illustrated any areas of dissent (for example if one coded an idea as a “1” while the other coded the idea “0”). The “percent agreement” was then calculated by determining how many times the coders agreed (meaning both coded an idea as “0” or “1”) and contrasting that number with the total number of ideas. Accordingly, out of the 158 ideas the coders identified from the e-mail sample, the coders were in agreement 140 times, presenting a reliability of 140/158 or roughly 89%.
Once the reliability was determined, we then went back to our data to examine some examples of euphemism both coders agreed upon. One obvious example was when a group member e-mailed someone that he would “eat” the $20 he was owed, meaning the person would forgo a debt owed to him. Another member referred to “crunch time,” in the context of staying ahead of a group project rather than leaving all the work undone until right before the assignment’s due date. Yet another member referred to a co-worker being “swamped,” meaning excessively busy, while another member used the phrase “plowing through the next two days” to imply nobly working through the academic challenges she faced that week. While many more examples were found, these were some of the most readily apparent.
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