Channels of Communication in Small Groups

Abstract

lem of the selection of materials. Have the responses been selected to illustrate what the leader wants to illustrate? Could other assortings of responses be made to illustrate something else-perhaps the futility of guided group conversation, as the method also has been called? Research on how to make use of transcriptions seems urgently needed. Perhaps investigators with different philosophical and methodological orientations could be induced to listen to, and to interpret, a succession of extensive transcriptions of actual group sessions. It would be interesting to see to what extent they reach similar conclusions from the babel of conversation! Some of these questions are directly involved in the further research now under way in connection with the New Jersey project in Guided Group Interaction. It would be my judgment that this experiment constitutes some of the most important research in criminology now going on in the United States. This work is likely to produce results of basic importance both for the practice of penology and for the advancement of research methodology in the field.