I have decided to do a sort of a project on studing different facial and body expressions in horses and how they are viewed and interpreted by different people.

Now I am not in any way scientifically trained so it wont be up to the high standard of a proper science study, more of a lay persons take on the whole thing.

After listening To Francis on the IHDG I thought it would be very interesting to really get a varied opinion off as many different peeps as poss .Obviously how someone is brought up, how they have trained , how they now train , different experiences will all have a factor in how they view what they are seeing.
Here are just some of the people I thought of asking :
Vets ,farriers,dentists, proffesionals , happy hackers, ct'ers, Parelli's , Ih's, BHs , children , no experience of horses at all !

I would make a video of different horses in different situations and ask people to fill in a questionaire with how they feel about the different horses viewed.

What are my aims : well firstly I'm not trying to prove anyone right or anyone wrong.I just want to see how many people agree or disagree.I certainly wont be filming a horse that 'I ' think has shut down and then congratulate those who agree with me....thats not what it is about ( firstly because it would be impossible to tell from a 30 sec snap shot ).

So would anyone on here be prepared to view the video when it is made and give me their views?

Also has anyone any advice about what should or shouldnt be added to video or questionaire or what to look out for as in pitfalls....
Thanks everyone
Rach

You might want to read a few papers done on Perception. There are too many psychologists to mention here, but I have an inkling a similar study was done in humans years ago. I can visualise the 'grumpy' person picture now! Reading human studies would give you an idea of how they went about it. Good luck!

I think it would be really interesting to do from my point of view....

Yes, human studies should give you some good ideas. I remember a Professor Winston programme (although I didnt take much in as I was watching it just before going to interview him and was terrified!) about how children can read emotions (pictures of humans with happy/sad/confused/hurt faces) better than teenagers. He did similar stuff in his latest series, studying how well parents understnad their own children. He had the kids look into different boxes that had things like bunnies, spiders, etc in and the parents had to guess what the child was thinking based on their expressions (the parents couldnt see what was in the box) and it was really interesting as some parents were really good at it but some failed in most cases e.g. they thought their kid was scared when it was really excited etc.
Anyway, sorry for the complete digression!

Hi Rach

What a fantastic idea! I'll certainly take part if you want me to

I'm combining my science and marketing head and have come up with some thoughts that might be worth thinking about.

OK, if it was me designing this case study/research I would want to make sure I have a diverse enough group to take data from. The categories you have choosen sound fantastic and will hopefully show some interesting differences, but I would also make sure you have a good spread male/female, ages, backgrounds and even things like location should be spread (if you think how diverse language is accross area's, if you take everyone from the NorthWest you can't really generalise your results to the rest of the UK). This might be hard for some of the groups such as farriery, being a majority male industry, but if you can find some female farriers any findings you get about the group could be more reliably put down to the insustrial attitudes of the job, rather than simply a 'male' trait, if you see what I meen - it just makes your results a bit more credible if you decided to put the result out into the public domain.

I guess you won't be using the same horse in your film? If not, you need to take into account things like people like different colours of horses and may attribute more positive emotions to certain colours, this also goes for breed, build - everything really. Also, I would try to be consistant with the shot of the horse - don't have a close up of one horse and then a distant shot of another because it could effect any results.

When designing your questionnaire, be careful with things like language use and use of questions. For example, whereever possible don't use description words that are specific to one area. Also, the best questions for amount of information you gain are open questions, where you allow people to put their own views in and write what they like, but this information can be very difficult to analyse becasue it is so diverse, therefore I'd try to use multiple choice questions. But, when using multiple choice questions, be careful not to limit people too much in what they can select.

Gosh, I could go on forever...I'm hoping to pop over to see you guys this weekend (if you are around that is), if you want me to waffle on some more then I will do

See you soon

Mx

That info is great Marie.Just the sort of stuff I'm after.As this is my first 'study' there are loads of things I hadven't thought of.Such as your suggestion on the colour of horse used.....never gave it a thought that other people might have a prejudice against certain colours because I don't i.e chestnut mare being bonkers.

I look forward to talking about it to you on Sat.Yes I'll be here.
See ya then hon
Rach