Question
I want to conduct an experiment and I found that the difficulty of a conflict to resolve could play a factor in this experiment. I now need an easy way of measuring the potential difficulty of a conflict, so that I can control this factor.
Own Proposal
I'm coming from StackOverflow and am used to present own proposals (since psychology is not primarily my field of expertise I wanted to have your opinion for my approach: I thought of a questionnaire that is supposed to measure various factors that could influence the difficulty of a conflict. The factors I thought of are:
- Personal Involvement (PI): The potential change and stress that a given conflict can have on the life of a conflict party. e.g. a colleague is telling you to bring out the trash while you don't feel like doing it.
- Influence of Emotions (IoE): How strong Emotions influence conflicts.
- Objective vs. Subjective (OvS): Are Arguments in the conflict based on evidence or are more testimonial kind.
- Risk (R): What is the probability and damage of an undesired outcome for a conflict party?
- Level of Society (LoS): 1-to-1 vs. 1-to-many vs. many-to-many, also is it a conflict between countries of just a few people. personal-family-inner friend circle-outer friend circle-foreign groups-countries-cultures ... just to give some example to what that could include.
- potential violence (PV): Probability and potential dangerousness of on party using violent measures.
- explicitness of conflict result(s) (ECR): I think some conflicts have explicit results like "Do Aliens exist?" and some don't necessarily have a definite answer like "What is an appropiate outfit for a woman? (which is answered differently in different cultures)"
- conflict resolution skills of the conflict partys (CRS): This also might include negotiating and communication skills as well.
- medium (M): speech, written, social network, face-to-face, etc.
I then thought of measuring those metrics on a scale of 1-7, weight them and add them add for some kind of conflict difficulty score:
Say Risk has a 10% influence on the conflict difficulty the weight, therefore, would be 0,1*(Scale of Risk). I also think this way the result might be 2 different scores depending on the partys point of view.
I also think that some of the metrics I proposed are not needed or cannot be measured using a questionnaire like the medium for example. But before I really go all the way to create a new questionnaire I wanted to know if I'm on the right track, if there is literature on this topic I missed, if I missed other important factors and so on.
Background
I have implemented a chat tool for my bachelors thesis, that displays emotions and handles profanity in messages differently. I know want to evaluate this software. The goal of this software is to improve communication in conflict situations and a new solution for hate speech in social networks. I also have a software engineer background and this is my first question in the psychology sector.