On The Effects Of Gender Differences On Compliments And Their Responses: A Case Study

Compliments and compliment responses(C and CR hereafter) are sensitive to and heavily influenced by many constraints and individual variables such as gender, age, levels of education, social status and social relationship. Gender is the major variable in the present study.The purpose of the study is to explore the different C—CR strategies adopted by Chinese college students and to investigate how gender influences the C—CR strategies.Interpretations are placed within the framework based on gender difference theory, politeness theory and face theory. The data are elicited by means of the open—ended questionnaire known as DCT and are analyzed by SPSS 12.0 software.Through quantitative and qualitative studies on the collected data, the author proved the hypothesis and here are the major findings:1) Female gives and receives more compliments than males do. It is indicated that women are supportive and affiliation-oriented; and that women are seen as appropriate recipients of all manners of social judgments.2) Female tends to use more explicit compliments than male does, while man tends to use more non-compliments and no response than female does.3) Female tends to apply more acceptance than male, while more males tend to choose acceptance with amendment, especially downgrade strategy.4) Female prefers to compliment on the topic of appearance and tends to accept compliment on appearance and prescribed female roles, while male prefers to accept on the topic of performance. This tendency may be related to the traditional prescribed roles for male and female. It is congruent with the traditional view that women are rated by how they appear and men are rated by what they do.5) On the same-gender level, females tend to give more compliments, while males tend to use no response strategy and Noncompliment strategy.6) On the different-gender level, females prefer acceptance strategy and males prefer acceptance with amendment.