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Anxiety & Debate: Thesis Study Results


	As I promised just about a year ago when I gathered the data for my thesis, I am posting a very brief summary/abstract of the study for those who are interested. I greatly appreciate the assistance of everyone who participated, and in particular the staff of ADI, Mid-DI, and NDI for their time, energy, and patience with the data collection process. I was very impressed with how much effort all three programs were willing to put in to make sure this went off without a hitch. It was quite fruitful in terms of my education and I think provided some good research. Hopefully the a more detailed report of the study will publish before next Spring.

Thanks to all,

Pat Gehrke

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Anxiety & Academic Debate: Development of a Debate Anxiety Index and Preliminary Performance - Anxiety Study
Pat Gehrke, CSU Chico

	Intercollegiate academic debate is a competitive public speaking activity. Debaters compete in paired teams of two against other pairs from colleges and universities around the United States. Critics evaluate the debaters' arguments and record quantified measures of performance. While an abundant body of literature exists for debate theory, little exists to provide guidance in argumentation pedagogy, particularly from a performance perspective. This study served the primary purpose of supporting the development and initial testing of a measurement index specific to anxiety in academic debate. In addition, it explored some preliminary findings of the relationship between this index and debate performance. This research followed the current trend in focusing on activity-specific anxiety measures and the long tradition of anxiety-performance literature, introducing both to the field of academic debate.

	The available literature on anxiety is wholly devoid of any discussion of anxiety in the context of academic debate. There are no previous indexes or measurement tools available for anxiety specific to the debate context. The index developed for this study factor analyzed into four main areas: emotionality-general; emotionality-physical; worry-confidence; and, worry-skills. Reliabilities for these indexes tended to be very high, with the exception of emotionality-physical which had an acceptable, but not encouraging, level of reliability. Though there is no previous research on the anxiety-performance relationship in competitive academic debate, the available research in related fields does provide a guide for debate anxiety research. Previous literature on anxiety and performance lead to the investigation of the following hypotheses.

H1 - A significant inverse relationship exists between debate anxiety and individual debate performance.

H2- The inverse relationship between cognitive components of debate anxiety (worry) and individual debate performance is stronger than the inverse relationship between somatic components of debate anxiety (emotionality) and individual debate performance.

	Hypothesis one received partial support. Hypothesis two received no support. Post-hoc analysis sought to uncover which variables were the strongest predictors for speaker points. Additionally, post-hoc analysis sought to explore some ways in which predictors varied by number of debate tournaments attended, years of high school debate, and sex. Post-hoc analyses discovered a number of intriguing relationships which may be useful to future researchers. Emergence of overall predictors for performance, as well as the variation in these predictors for different sub-groups present a diverse set of research opportunities. 

	The exploratory nature of this study goes far to open a variety of doors to scholars and researchers interested in improving the experience and knowledge of the debate community and helping to build a debate pedagogy. However, that same exploratory nature makes it impossible to draw conclusions from this study alone. Rather, future research is critical to continuing this effort and to building a strong pedagogical theory for teaching and coaching competitive debate.
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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