Square Dance Experimentation

[bjarvis]

I started wondering a little while ago: who has to dance more steps, the folks dancing boy or girl? Does this vary from level to level? Do some callers make one role work harder than the other (at least in terms of dance steps)?

Tonight, the experimentation began.

Tonight was a rare 5th Thursday so DC Lambda Squares hosted an A2/C1 club night with Ett McAtee calling. I put pedometers on at least each dancer of a particular couple and recorded their step count per tip, noting which were A2 and which were C1.

While the pedometers are of the same manufacturer and lot, they have different sensitivity. I'm trusting that by randomly switching these between dancers across the course of the experiment, the variation will average out in a sufficiently large sample space.

The raw numbers aren't meaningful yet. I'll write more on this when I have a much larger sample. Who knows... it may be good filler in a slow news quarter for the GCA journal. :-)

Comments

[allanh.livejournal.com]

filler? FILLER?!

No, I think this is more along the lines of a feature article. Light-hearted, perhaps ... but I still think it'd be a fun article.

I'll add it to my list of expected articles for the next issue.

Thank you! [smiling oh-so-sweetly]

[fuzzygruf.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't think that at MS/Plus you'd need the pedometers. Swing your partner, Ladies Chain, Ladies Rollaway, Teacup Chain all have girls doing more steps.

I'm interested in seeing the A2/C1 stats, though!

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

My intuition is that the girls have to take more steps in MS than the boys, less so in Plus and about the same in A2 and higher. Others have argued that while the girls have to take more steps --twirling, for example-- the boys have to travel longer distances walking around the outside of most commonly used formations. I'm curious if any of these preconceptions is actually provable scientifically, hence my little study.

The downside is that I rarely get to dance A2 --I've had precisely two opportunities since the Anaheim convention-- and even less exposure to C1 (since I don't dance it myself). It'll take a while to get a meaningful amount of data.

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

The men should be moving on all the calls you listed. Unless the squares have gotten huge, the girls are only going a couple steps across the square, and unless the boys are standing there like lumps they need to be stepping out and to the side to let the girls come out into the correct position for the curtesy turn. The rollaway is the only one that the girls are moving more than the boys and even then that is only from a line...in a circle everyone is moving, the boys are just going to the side rather than rolling across. The little bit that the girls move more on something like a Ladies Chain 3/4 would be offset by all the times the boys Star by the left or right to pick them up.

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

Are these the same pedometers that you and Kent wore all day that said you had walked to DC and back and that he had spend the day in a chair...?

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Not quite that dramatic, but yup. That's why they're being randomly assigned in each test couple... in a sufficiently large sample, the odds of each having the more sensitive pedometer approaches 50%.

Alternatively, I could wear both of them myself, take multiple measures, determine the skew of the more sensitive one and use that factor to normalize the numbers. This however would require additional record keeping to mark which dancer received which pedometer.

It was easier to declare Pluto wasn't a planet.

[cuyahogarvr.livejournal.com]

It will be interesting to analyze your results. As a bi-dancer in MS/Plus, I've "assumed" that the female took many more steps. However, tdjohnson makes some very good observations in his first post that makes me wonder if it's not more equal. Definitely post your findings.

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

Alternatively, I could wear both of them myself, take multiple measures, determine the skew of the more sensitive one and use that factor to normalize the numbers.

This looks like the more reliable correction, though. You should normalise by having the same dancer (which could be you), because the bouncing around that a dancer does is significantly different from flat-level walking, and I suspect that the differences between the two may be exacerbated by that.

This however would require additional record keeping to mark which dancer received which pedometer.

However, to eliminate this increased record keeping, I further suggest that once you've normalised the two (two or at most three full evenings of dancing, both worn by the same dancer, maybe one night lead one night follow), designate one as the "boy" pedometer and the other as the "girl" pedometer. Then you'll know from your own records which pedometer was which, and the correction factor is constantly applied to just one set of data.

It's been a while since I danced regularly, and I always danced follow, but I got the distinct impression we were having more fun and bouncing around a bit more than the leads. (Teacup chain particularly springs to mind). You might find stats skewed by people who style more than others.

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

Just to be clear, the pedometer measures roughly the NUMBER of steps, not the distance traveled per step?

I've never actually seen one close up.

dance for 1

[mediamutt.livejournal.com]

It's a shame my bf doesn't like country dancing. The short year I did it was very fun.

Oh, and I've changed my LiveJournal handle from "pavlenyi" to "mediamutt". You might want to update your friends' list accordingly.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

The cheapo pedometers I have merely measure number of steps. More advanced ones can take a preset which will then be used to calculate a total distance as well.

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

yes, but that preset / calibration only works for walking, where the user can calibrate for the length of his/her pace, which is going to be pretty standard for flat walking.

dancing on the other hand has steps of many different lengths, and the distribution of long/short/medium will vary by dance and dancer (and that's what you're trying to measure). You won't get distance travelled out of a pedometer for dancing. You'll only get numbers of steps. The instrument works on a weeny pendulum, and count the number of times your upper leg moves forward, out of the vertical.