An Empirical Research On Chinese-American Communication Styles

Communication has been inevitable ever since human beings began to inhabit this planet. Along with the progress of society and development of civilization, international communication is becoming even more necessary and frequent. We live in a world in which changes in technology, travel, economic and political systems, immigration patterns, and population density expose us to increasing interaction with people from different cultures. Today's intercultural encounters are more abundant and more significant than ever before. No country claims no communication with the outside as it struggles to take a stand in the world. To a Chinese mind, intercultural communication is first and foremost reminding of communication between China and the United States, most frequently taken as two typical collectivistic and individualistic cultures. Although we can find many quantitative researches by foreign scholars, they are not specifically on communication between Chinese and Americans, while most researches done by Chinese scholars have been qualitative and few are quantitative. For this reason the present research makes an empirical effort.Under the theoretical framework of Hofstede's cultural individualism-collectivism, and Triandis et al's four typology of I/C to measure individualism and collectivism, the present thesis is using a questionnaire composing of two parts as an instrument to collect data of cultural individualism/collectivism value and the direct/indirect communication styles for both American and Chinese college students. After data analysis using SPSS and Microsoft Excel, the thesis came up with the following major findings:1. Individualism-collectivism is one of the major value tendencies at cultural level to account for the diversities in communication behavior in different cultural contexts. Data analysis in the present study proves that the United States is an individualistic culture and China a collectivistic culture.2. In situations of society, school and family, Americans tend to employ direct communication style whereas Chinese tend to employ indirect communication style. In spite of such a general tendency, a difference though slight of the family situation from the other two is revealed. That is, the Chinese communicate more directly in family than they do in society and at school.3. As to the correlation between cultural values and communication styles, the study presents a rather complex picture: for Americans, there is a moderate correlation between individualism value and direct communication style, i.e. their individualism value encourages them to communicate directly; whereas for Chinese, data analysis does not present such a correlation. Thus what factors influence and determine the Chinese indirect communication style needs further exploration.In passing, the author points out the limitations of the present study and puts forward perspectives for future research.