Nightmares and Worries in the United States.

In your own words, please…

Revealing the worldview's panorama involves understanding the general content and form of the natural language data acquired in response to our free response item. To do this, we first identify the gists, or individual word forms that are relatively overrepresented in them³. We then consider the overall style of the response set through measures of its vocabulary and verbosity. These gists and this style information then give us a sense of the whole—or as we call it, the panorama—presented by the worldview.

The foremost ranked few words of any dataset utilizing quantitative phenomenology reveal the general mood of that dataset. A mood comprises the general way in which a topic or event is approached or considered, i.e., whether it is self-reflective, object-oriented, or other-oriented. The primary aspect of mood in both the nightmares and worries is self-reflective, as revealed by the words, "I," "my," and, "me" This indicates that the content is primarily about the self and its possessions. The secondary aspect of mood for nightmares is object-oriented and past-tense, as revealed by the words "and," "was," "the," "a," "it," "that," and, "had," among others. That is, the language produced in response to the nightmares question is secondarily about objects, generally in the past tense. The secondary aspect of mood for worries, however, is relationally object-oriented in the present-tense, as revealed by the words, "to," "and," "the," "about," "a," "of," "in," and "is." Prepositions such as "to," "about," "of," and, "in," are generally used to describe an object in relation to another object or person, and are therefore relational. The word, "is," reveals the present-tense, as may become more readily apparent when comparing this word to the words, "was" and, "had," which were frequently used in response to the nightmares question, but not as frequently used in response to the worries question.

Thus, while both questions primarily invoke self-reflective moods, responses to the nightmares question tend to be about the past (as in a recollection), while the responses to the worries question tend to be relational and an in the present tense. When combined with the low-average 6th-grade Flesch-Kincaid score, we conclude that response content to the nightmares question is likely informally written recollection about a past event. The responses to the question about worries is likewise informally written, however it more frequently pertains to a current situation, and due to the lower average word-count per response is more direct and concise in phrasing.

Worldviews are determined by the people, places, and times that co-create them. Therefore, in order to more fully understand the worldview on the nightmares and worries presented in this survey, we highlight those aspects that contextualize and influence our findings. We call these contextualizing and influencing aspects viewpoints. We consider these viewpoints according to their origin in human factors (kuturgeist), spatial or environmental factors (ortgeist), or time-based factors (zeitgeist).

The parts of a worldview consist of the major units of meaning in the responses. We asked our participants to respond in their own words to two distinct questions. We therefore partition our meaning units accordingly, resulting in two distinct parts of the worldview:

• A part containing the themes and model statements derived from their most recent nightmares, and
• A part containing the themes and model statements derived from their descriptions of that which worries them most in their daily lives.

Themes are structured from word networks, which center on the most frequent and overrepresented non-mood related (e.g., I, my, me, was, about, am) and stimulus associated (e.g., nightmare, most, recent, worries, daily, life) concepts. These networks are based on the frequency of actual association between words in the original dataset. They graphically display the most frequent ordered relations between concepts as they are expressed in the language of our participants. Figures 9-11 present three such word networks for the most frequent overrepresented concepts (house, get, and trying) used by respondents when asked to describe their most recent nightmare. Figures 12-14 present three such word networks for the most frequent overrepresented concepts (have, being, and money) used by respondents when asked to tell us what most worries them in their daily lives.

We can further elaborate on the themes so far presented to construct more detailed model statements. In this demonstration, we show how we can do so by expanding the word network surrounding each concept. Doing so identifies ways that existing concepts connect with other concepts in the dataset. Here, we present such elaborations for the the top three most popular concepts produced in response to both parts (or questions): our participants' most recent nightmare, and our participants' daily worries.

Though it was not needed to construct the model statements in this demonstration, reducing the meaning unit to include only those sentences or responses containing the concept is another way of elaborating on themes. See this demonstration for an example of doing so.

These expanded word networks elaborate on the actions, people, places, qualities, and things associated with each of the target words, and facilitate the construction of the foremost model statements listed at the beginning of this worldview for each open-ended question posed to our participants.

Given the foremost model statements, panorama, and mood of the natural language analyzed in this survey, we find its contents to be informal self-reflection. The responses about nightmares is secondarily object oriented in the past tense, while the responses to daily worries are relationally object oriented. Nightmares predominately occur in—or related to—an otherwise safe place (such as a house, home, or car), and generally involve a pursuit or threat to individuals, in terms of their sense of safety or security. Daily worries generally pertain to access to resources or those things that provide resources, such as money and jobs. They are secondarily about the health of family members, but again generally in terms of having the resources to take care of them.

The foremost model statements presented herein do not vary in their content across the people, places, and time involved in our survey, though some less predominant themes (not presented in this worldview) do vary according to gender. Age, location, and time of submission also do not impact the content of the foremost model statements presented in this worldview, though again less popular themes not presented in this worldview do vary according to age (such as increasing likely hood of mentioning high school in younger ages). Our foremost model statements can then be applied generally across age, gender, location, and time of submission.

When asked how often in your daily life are you concerned about the main fear expressed in your nightmare, the tendency was to respond with a rating below the mid-point on the 7-point scale, indicating that such fears are not consciously considered in the daily life of our respondents. However, when asked how much of a daily worry their described worries are to our respondents, the tendency was to select a response above the mid-point, with the response of 7 (equivalent to, "overwhelming") on the scale of 1-7 being the most frequent selection. This would indicate that the worries reported by our participants are often present to them in an intense manner during their day-to-day lives. As with age, gender, location, and time of submission, the rating selected on these scales did not appear to influence the foremost model statements presented in this worldview. Such model statements can then be generally applied across levels of concern about the nightmares being expressed, as well as level of impact of the worries being described.

Our results are bounded by the people, places, and time in which they were produced. For example, our participants were drawn from Amazon Mechanical Turk workers located in the United States. The cut-off threshold of 5 that we used for our analysis makes it such that our confidence estimate for our results exceeds the total likely population of available Mechanical Turk workers in the United States at any given time⁴. We are, therefore, quite confident that our results can be generally applied to this population, at least at this point in history.

There is an increasing tendency among American researchers in the social sciences to utilize Mechanical Turk workers to complete surveys intended for generalization to the U.S. population. Doing so requires consideration as to whether they maintain certain characteristics or experiences that vary from that expressed by the typical person in this nation. These characteristics or experiences may, in turn, systematically relate to variation in thoughts about a given topic. Current studies comparing the demographics of Mechanical Turk workers to the background US population indicate that they may be somewhat younger, more educated, less racially diverse, and less affluent than the general US population.

Generalization beyond Mechanical Turk workers to Americans at-large would then depend on whether or not the aforementioned differences between in affluence, age, education, and race influence the foremost model statements produced by this survey. Given that we found no need to vary the content of the foremost model statements based on age, gender, location, or time of submission, we believe age differences between the average Mechanical Turk worker and the average person in the United States would have no bearing on the foremost model statements being produced by these two groups. We are aware of no existing research indicating that affluence, education, or race has an effect on nightmare content. As a result, we therefore believe that the foremost model statements related to nightmares can be generalized to people in the United States broadly.

Disparities in affluence are systematically related to educational attainment and race in the United States. Since Mechanical Turk workers tend to have higher levels of education and are less diverse than the US population, such differences would logically lead to the expectation that such individuals should be relatively less concerned about health, job security, money, and resources than the typical person in the United States. At the same time, however, Mechanical Turk workers are as a group relatively less affluent than the average person in the United States. Given the same logic then, this would likely predispose them to relatively more concern about health, job security, money, and resources. We believe, therefore, that these mutually conflicting probabilities allow us to apply the foremost model statements related to daily worries to the middle and lower economic segments in the United States broadly.