Searching for Simplification: An Analysis of Josephine Caricato’s “Visuals for Speaking Presentations: An Analysis of the Presenter’s Perspective of Audience as a Partner in Visual Design”

1. Caricato’s research design presents more weaknesses than strengths with regard to validity and reliability. The main areas of weakness include sample size and source credibility.
The sample of participants in Caricato’s survey seems rather small. They are 75 total, only 15 people representing each of five industries. Further, all of the participants are from the same area in southern Colorado. This could be a threat to reliability and external validity since the responses from this sample population would likely not match the responses from participants in Manhattan, for example, or be representative of teachers, administrators, and CEOs across the country. MacNealy relates external validity to generalizability by asking “Do the results of a particular study apply beyond conditions of that study? Are the results applicable to other persons in other contexts?” (66). It seems to me that the answer would be no. In order to strengthen the reliability and validity of this participant population, I would suggest increasing the sample size, and recruiting participants from various parts of the country.

The other noticeable weakness in Caricato’s research is the sources she uses to support her argument regarding the importance of audience analysis and awareness in creating visuals. First, many of her sources are from as far back as 1987, including Catherine Alberty, Joyce Hutton, Robert Nielsen, Scott Sanders, and S.M. Selton. For an article published in 2000, these sources appear rather old. Further, many of their articles come from conference proceedings. MacNealy warns against the use (or overuse) of such sources, stating, “less weighty in scholarly authority are those articles published in the proceedings of meetings or conferences. The reason is fourfold” (21). Caricato should have used more recent, more credible sources as the basis for her argument.

Regarding the survey itself, Caricato used a “qualitative descriptive questionnaire containing 69 statements” (498). This seems like a lot. I wonder if Caricato could have achieved her goals using fewer statements. Sam Dragga’s article, “Is This Ethical?” for example, reports rather thorough findings based on the responses to just seven scenarios. At the same time, the organization of these 69 statements may have made answering the questionnaire easier considering that Caricato organized the statements into “15 subcategories” (499). She also demonstrated a detailed effort to minimize bias by revising her statements several times after review by university professors, as well as practice-participants (499).
Considering Caricato’s use of the Likert Scale to rate responses, it seems like a reasonable tool. At the same time, many response means fell into the category of “sometimes,” which seems vague. Caricato addresses this by interpreting the “sometimes” response saying, “I have designated a dividing line below the ‘usualy’ validity frequency range [which] indicates areas that need to be addressed” (502).
Overall, the research design appears generally effective, but could be moreso if the sample size were larger, sources more recent, and survey more streamlined.

2. As a report of the results of empirical research, this article proves to be thorough; however, it still contains some gaps in its interpretation of data, as well as some overly cumbersome visuals.
To begin with, the overall presentation might have been more coherent if it had begun with an abstract or summary stating the conclusions of the survey in advance. Many successful research articles are structured this way, including Dragga’s “Is this Ethical?” and DeJong’s “Toward a Document Evaluation Methodology.” Instead, after providing some background context,
Caricato provides only her hypotheses, saving her results and conclusion to be presented later.
Regarding other structural issues, the article does not contain one table or figure included on the same page on which it is referenced. Most visuals fall on the next page, after being discussed in the text. Some, including Table 4 and Figure 4 appear two pages after the verbal interpretation of them. As a reader, it becomes cumbersome to flip pages back and forth, or to scroll up and down repeatedly while trying to read.
The inconsistencies in the visuals are also distracting. Some bar graphs are two-dimensional, some are three-dimensional. Considering that one of Caricato’s arguments is that technical advances sometimes lead presenters to add visual noise that confuses the audience, the unnecessary use of 3-D bar graphs is ironic. Further, some bar graphs contain too much information that could perhaps be better digested when broken up. For example, Figure 4 shows six different bars for five different industries, plus one set of six representing an overall mean. Further, the legend describing these bars is labeled by question number, such as Q2-A, Q2-D, instead of using key words to remind readers what they actually represent. As a reader, I had to label them myself. The simplification of this metadata would remedy some of the confusion suffered by readers of these graphs.
Finally, the interpretation of some of this data seems to be lacking in logic, specifically the area concerning gender sensitivity. Caricato’s effort to avoid mentioning gender in her questionnaire leads her to survey her participants about shapes. The results show that speakers use slightly more angular shapes than curved. The author interprets this as an effort by speakers to address a “mixed-gender audience” (508). In the same paragraph, though, she describes these use of shapes as differing according to their functions, the type of information they are made to convey. So, relating the functional use of shapes to a measure of gender sensitivity seems far-fetched.
All in all, Caricato’s argument that speakers ought to analyze potential audiences and utilize this information to drive the structure of their visuals is a convincing one. However, her own use of visuals happens to be one of the most distracting elements of the report.

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