culture, conflict, & interpersonal communication

Much of the research in interpersonal communication relies on student participants attending U.S. universities and colleges and often those participants are communication studies majors or students enrolled in communication studies classes. I'm not the first scholar to make this observation and some have even defended the use of student populations, arguing students are representative of the general population. I don't find this argument persuasive. Communication scholars must do a better job of studying a wide variety of groups so we can examine differences and similarities across populations.

That's why in the web lecture for this week I discussed research that examines conflict in multiple cultures. For example, the Ting-Toomey et al. study I discuss focused on self-construal and conflict style using a fairly diverse population. The researchers found conflict styles are influenced by how communicators view themselves. What I found even more interesting was the Oetzel et al. study which provides a more fine-grained analysis of collectivist vs. individualist cultures than is usually offered. Rather than assuming facework strategies to manage conflict are the same within each group, these researchers found that strategies within each type of culture can vary. Squirelhands found similar research discussed in Chapter 12 interesting as well in part because it meshes with concepts and research in other communication studies courses. Rubei found the research on Chinese teachers and conflicts something she could relate to because it identified cultural differences in compliance gaining.

These two studies and others discussed in the web lecture remind us that culture influences definitions of conflict, interpretations of communicative behaviors associated with conflict, the conflict styles communicators choose to use, and how those styles are enacted. Particularly as the U.S. population becomes more diverse, interpersonal communication scholars need to move away from surveying undergraduates at a large midwestern university and make a greater effort to find out how conflict plays out in a variety of relationships with a variety of people.

--Professor Cyborg