"Did You Hear Me!?!?" (Applied)

"Did you just hear what I said!?" yells Amanda Bynes in her hit television show What I Like About You as she is in a fight with her boyfriend. This argument within this particular episode of What I Like About You is full of common communication flaws. For example, Amanda and her boyfriend both talk in a loud tone at the same time, making it impossible to listen to one another. Also, neither of them or even willing to listen to the other person's story because they are both so focused on getting their own message across. Hollywood often portrays many boyfriend/girlfriend, and husband/wife relationships to have challenges seeing eye to eye at times. Amanda's quote, "Did you just hear what I said!?" is a line that Hollywood employs as well as everyday people do, to clarify if the other person or peoples are listening. 

After acknowledging this common trend in communication I have developed the hypothesis that if someone uses this phrase with a loud tone in an argument it tends to upset the other person more. There are several possible ways I could go about affirming this information. First, I need to recognize that this will be an experiment of the social sciences since I would hope to understand if this rule or question explains the following behavior of another person. I would have to employ the three step process of question, observe, and three step process. Furthermore, I would apply the qualitative research method because "Qualitative researchers gain understanding through interpreting and elaborating, or making explicit, human conditions and events holistically as they occur in the world," ( Dues 61). Therefore, I would use in-depth interviews, as well as,  conversation analysis to be able to judge people's reactions to the question properly. After following this process I should be able to tell if it is a universal truth that people become instantly aggravated when someone angrily shouts, "Did you hear me!?" or something similar. 

Works Cited

Dues, Michael, and Mary Brown. Boxing Plato's Shadow : An Introduction to the Study of Human Communication. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages, 2003.