The Influence Of Culture On Perceived Fairness Of Grading Procedures

Although procedural fairness has long been an important focus of intercultural communication studies, not much research has been done on Chinese people, and those few mostly have people from Hong Kong or Taiwan as their research subjects. In response to this, this thesis examines whether the same relationship between cultures and procedural fairness discussed by previous research also exists within Chinese people, specifically, within a group of Chinese high school students.To answer the above research question, this thesis first introduces a brief literature review generally on cross-cultural studies of fairness, procedural fairness and its two principles, namely voice (being given opportunity to appeal the decision) and interactional fairness (being treated with respect and given explanations in the decision-making process). Then it introduces more specifically how collectivism/individualism and power distance influence students'fairness perceptions in grading procedures respectively in terms of voice condition and interactional condition.Drawing from the literature review, three hypotheses were proposed. To test the hypotheses, data were collected from a group of 163 high school students from No. 3 Middle School in Lin Fen, Shanxi Province, based on their self-report fairness perceptions and cultural orientation. Based on a quantitative analysis of the data collected, all the three hypotheses are confirmed and data reveal that a) the high school students in Lin Fen value interactional justice more than voice in a perceived fair grading procedure; b) the high school students in Lin Fen who are more collectivism-oriented perceive as fairer the grading procedure with interactional conditions; and c) the high school students in Lin Fen who are higher in power distance are more likely to accept the grading procedure in which they are not given opportunities to appeal the grades.The research confirmed previous findings on how culture influences people's fairness perception. However, in light of the uninvestigation about the participants, more research, especially of a qualitative nature, is needed to make further explanations in terms of conditions such as the gender and family location. In the end, limitations of the research are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.