Mulitiple Modernities: A Comparative Study On Styles Of Managing Interpersonal Conflicts Between American And Chinese University Students

My thesis research constitutes an interdisciplinary attempt to study how interpersonal conflicts are handled among contemporary university students in coastal China from both an emic (local) and etic (universal) approach. I was mainly driven by two probing questions of interest: 1) Is the overarching framework of Individualism/Collectivism prevalent in the cross-cultural research the conceptual toolkit with which one can make sense of the Chinese psychology and conflict communication? 2) How does the tension between modernity and traditionality play out among the adult cohort extensively exposed to modernization?In the first study, over-reliance upon Individualism/Collectivism was critiqued from the perspective of social psychology and communication; antecedents of Chinese way of handling conflicts endemic to the Chinese culture were reviewed. In conjunction with the use of interviews, data from self-report questionnaires revealed variation of conflict styles that ranged from situation to situation. The stereotypical view of Chinese being obliging and avoiding was not supported.The second study built upon the first one by drawing a cross-cultural comparison with a student sample in the United States and incorporating measures of self-construals. For both samples, self-construals were found to have poor power in predicting facework behaviors. Convergence and divergence between American and Chinese samples were analyzed by taking a more contextual approach and taking into account the dynamic interplay of modernity and traditionality.Implications for cross-cultural research were noted. I called for moving beyond the simplistically cross-national comparisons based upon unwarranted assumptions and enunciated the concept of multiple modernities.