GAINING TURNS AND ACHIEVING HIGH INFLUENCE RANKING IN SMALL CONVERSATIONAL GROUPS

Unacquainted subjects, in groups of four or five, viewed and then discussed a television programme on the topic of homosexuality. Afterwards, they ranked each group member in terms of how influential the member had been during the discussion. High-ranking members, compared to low-ranking members, had a greater proportion of aggregare speaking turns, thus replicating Brooke & Ng's (1986) finding. Aggregate turns were then divided into turns gained by interruptive or non-interruptive means; and the two turn types were used to predict influence ranking in an attempt to test the idea that turns were a resource for achieving influence regardless of how they were gained. Supportive results were found: interruption-turns, like non-interruption-turns, reliably predicted influence ranking. For reasons yet to be tested, interruption-turns were in fact superior to non-interruption-turns for predicting influence ranking.