While researching the cultural processes of inequality in community organizations, sociologist Andrea Voyer found that manners and etiquette often are noted in racial, ethnic, class and gender exclusion.<\/p>\n
In studying a parent-teacher group in a public school, for example, white and wealthy PTA parents rejected the efforts of volunteers of poor and Latinx parents who they considered \u201crude.\u201d And within an elite black church, more affluent church members determined that lower-income newcomers were \u201cnot the right kind of people\u201d for the church based on their use of language and more casual dress sitting in the pew.<\/p>\n
Such examples led Voyer to a new area of study.<\/p>\n
\u201cI realized that expectation of manners made it acceptable to judge and exclude in ways that were reproducing social inequality,\u201d says Voyer, a research professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and an associate senior lecturer in sociology at Stockholm University. \u201cAs a result of that research I decided to study etiquette itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Voyer is studying \u201cEmily Post\u2019s Etiquette,\u201d the book written by the doyenne of manners first published in 1922 and currently in its nineteenth printing with the most recent update, \u201cEmily Post\u2019s Etiquette: Manners for Today,\u201d published in 2017. The 19 editions include more than 7 million words and 90,000 pages of text. The research is supported by a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation.<\/p>\n
Voyer is taking an innovative approach to the study of etiquette by utilizing the emerging research approach known as computational sociology, which uses computer science to study the social world. Computational sociology can take two major forms — big data analysis, which follows established models of social network structure and analysis by gathering as much information as possible; or a data science approach, which focuses on content analysis. Voyer is using the content analysis approach.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy adopting a study of multiple editions of the same book what I get to do is look at exactly what changed, from edition to edition,\u201d she says. \u201cThe benefit is that the research is almost like a panel study. Each time a new edition is written, it\u2019s written in some relationship to the book that came before. When I see a change across editions, I can identify it much more easily but I can also try to find out where it came from.\u201d<\/p>\n
Voyer will have access to the archives of The Emily Post Institute, which the writer established in 1946 and has continued to publish new editions of the book by Post\u2019s family since her death in 1960. Correspondence between Post and her publisher could provide insight on changes from edition to edition, Voyer says. The Institute has a website with etiquette information and programs for business, weddings and children. It also publishes etiquette columns and created the \u201cAwesome Etiquette\u201d podcast.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe language [in the book] has changed, the structure of the book has changed but in addition to that the underlying ideas of manners have shifted as well,\u201d Voyer says. \u201cThe biggest, most obvious example of that is that in the early books Emily Post begins with a discussion of what she considers a reference group that she calls \u2018Best Society.\u2019 The point of the book is to describe what the best people do so other people can learn and emulate that. Over the years what you see is the emergence instead of this idea that manners are for everyone and you don\u2019t have to have some reference group that is the social elite of society; that there is this common sense courtesy and kindness. You see this happening over the course of the different editions of the book.\u201d<\/p>\n
In noting some of the changes in language over the years, for example, Voyer says in the 1922 edition of \u201cEtiquette,\u201d verb words used to discuss manners are the more rigid \u201ccan\u201d and \u201cask,\u201d while in 2011 the verbs change to the more flexible \u201callowed\u201d and \u201cpermitted.\u201d The guidelines for smoking for \u201cgentlemen\u201d and \u201cladies\u201d in locations such as \u201cballroom,\u201d \u201ctable\u201d and \u201cdrawing room\u201d appear throughout the first edition of the book, along with indications for the time and place for smoking. In more recent editions, there are more definite circumstances in which smoking is allowed or permitted.<\/p>\n
Voyer says using this approach to research in social sciences was not an option during her training as a scholar so she has attended seminars to learn how to utilize the methodology to both explore new areas of research and transfer knowledge to graduate students assisting her with her research.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the great things I\u2019m excited about with this research is providing the opportunity for students to get trained in this approach and gain facility in computational sociology,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s my hope that there will be students who will want to do substantive work with their own questions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe language has changed, the structure of the book has changed but in addition to that the underlying ideas of manners have shifted as well,\u201d says UConn’s Andrea Voyer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":150042,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2076,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1918],"class_list":["post-149032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-research","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-10 07:55:01","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149032"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150043,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149032\/revisions\/150043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/150042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149032"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=149032"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=149032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}