Sobieraj & Berry (2011) conceptualized and measured types of political incivility that they termed "outrage". The researchers identified 13 types of recurring speech and behavior that constituted outrage, and they developed a codebook to define each. These are the 13 variables: insulting language, name calling, emotional display, emotional language, verbal fighting/sparring, character assassination, misrepresentative exaggeration, mockery, conflagration, ideologically extremizing language, slippery slope, belittling, and obscene language (p. 26, explanations about the variables – pp. 39-41).

Acoording to Turnage (2008), the most common characteristics of flaming identified in the literature as a whole are: hostility, aggression, intimidation, insults, offensive language or tone, unfriendliness, uninhibited behavior, and sarcasm. The researcher measured these eight variables in email recipients’ responses to a given set of messages. In addition, other attributes that may be characteristic of flaming were examined in the email messages studied, such as profanity, use of all caps, excessive punctuation, and emoticons (p.48-49).

For the purposes of measuring the resulting answers, the seven increments on the scale were assigned scores of one through seven, with one indicating the highest extreme and seven indicating the lowest. Therefore, if a respondent rated a particular email to be high on hostility, aggression, etc., then that particular email would be more likely to be considered a flame by that participant.

[[category: deliberation]]