Gesture Research – Data Analysis (Part 3: Cultural Differences)

The next question is: were there cultural differences in the participant created gestures? We ran a number of different analyses to help us answer this question.

The first analysis we ran is: did one country use certain gestures more than any other country? To answer this question, we analyzed the top 38 gestures (gestures that had more than 40 people use them) and ran a chi-squared analysis to identify if one country used that gesture more than another. There were no significant differences found in that analysis. Thus, this analysis did not identify any significant differences between countries in their use of the top gestures.

The second analysis we ran was to assess whether one country used certain types of gestures more than another. We classified all the gestures into 2 categories:

1. Direct manipulation
2. Symbolic

A direct manipulation gesture is a gesture where the participant using gestures that relate at least loosely to the real world. So, to move an object, the participant touches the object and then physically drags it to a new location. Or, to scroll, the user will touch the screen and push it one direction or another.

A symbolic gesture is a gesture where the participant creates a symbol that conveys a desired action, such as drawing a question mark for help or making an “x” over an object to delete it.

We ran an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to evaluate the use of direct manipulation versus symbolic gestures. We ran an 8 x 2 x 2 ANOVA to analyze the differences shown by 8 Countries (China, Finland, France, Germany, Finland, India, Spain, UK, USA),  2 Genders (Male, Female), and 2 levels of Experience (Expert, Novice). This analysis showed the main effect of Country was significant (p <0.01), as was the interaction between Country and Gender (p < 0.05). The main effect of Country was very interesting and we looked at it in more detail. Subsequent analyses showed the following differences depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1:

The third analysis we conducted was actually more of a visual inspection of the data itself. We looked at the detailed results from each country, as shown in Data Analysis (Part 2: Winners and Tails), and looked for differences between countries that were explainable based on culture. We found no pattern to any of the differences we saw that was explainable as based on culture (aside from the pattern already noted above that Chinese participants used more symbolic gestures than any other country). We did find a pattern that at first looked like a cultural difference (see the results for Scroll Up, Scroll Down, Back, and Forward), but in further analyses discovered that it was actually an experiential difference, which we will discuss next.