Extrovert Insights: A Dive into My Interaction Habits
One of the first things people learn growing up is to speak to and interact with people. Although some might do it more than others as they grow older, it will always be a part of our everyday routine. Whether it is talking to your family, partner, strangers, or classmates, you are destined to speak to someone throughout the day. This leads me to my question: Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
I have always been told that I am a chatterbox, a very sociable, and extroverted person. As claimed by Psychologist Carl Jung, somebody who is considered an extrovert has a “personality that is often characterized by expressive and having outgoing patterns of behavior”. From that characterization of an extrovert, I fit in perfectly. I love talking and getting to know people which ultimately has led me to study Communications as well as striving to have a big following, fame, and be an influence on people in the future.
Although I already knew that I was a very sociable person, I wanted to put that to the test which led me to track my data to see if I actually was this sociable person who spoke to anyone or if that is what people thought because I speak loud. I wanted to start tracking my data on a day when I knew I had the ability to interact with people throughout the day. Starting on Tuesday, September 5th, I decided to track my data because I had class as well as needed to take the bus to school that day giving me the chance to speak to people I usually speak to and to strangers along the way. I tried to follow up with my regular patterns and interactions and forgot that was tracking my data so the data would not be tampered by my own self by wanting to talk to more people than I usually do. After every interaction that I had, I would write their name down in my notes app to tally them up at the end of the day and put them in a category that they fit in to see what color and how many circles I needed to make for the final data visualization.
I wanted my data visualization to truly show the amount of times that I spoke to somebody which led me to use color as my key method of encoding as well as giving Area be my second method of encoding. I assigned every person that I interacted with a different color and put them in a category, for example, If I spoke to my mom or dad that day, they got a blue circle. Since people that I interact with on a daily basis are not from Florida, I filled in their Circle to show that I had spoken to them over the phone. I also used area as my second method of encoding to show truly how much I spoke to that person throughout my day with the big black Circle representing my whole entire day and the colored circles representing my interactions of that day. This showed how much I interacted with people throughout the day. A day that shows that I had a lot of interactions would be on Friday, September 8th when I went to a party and had to interact with a lot of people which caused my circle to be almost full of interactions compared to Saturday, September 9th where I stayed home and barley had any interactions.
For my second data visualization, I used two types of methods of encoding which were position and color. Compared to the first data visualization, this one shows the exact number of interactions I had with people. Through this data visualization, I realized that I tend to speak to people one or two times a day if they are classmates, my roommate, professor, or stranger compared to the 4–10 times a day I would speak to my parents or friends. The color method of encoding that I used for the second data visualization followed the same key as the First Data visualization to show that it is the same data between the two. These two visualizations show truly how much interaction takes up my day and how many interactions I am having.
From the research that I had conducted on myself, I realized that people are certainly correct when they call me a chatterbox and a big extrovert. What I found interesting though is that out of the hundreds of people that I see throughout the day, I only consistently spoke with the people that I feel comfortable with and did not go out of my way to speak to strangers unless I was in a party setting. Does this make me an introvert since I had only a handful of interactions for most of my days and they were all from people I constantly speak to which can seem to be non-sociable and introverted to others? No, but this has truly made me discover that yes I’m social and never stop talking but I should really open up more and expand who I speak to other than my inner circle.
