skip to main content
10.1145/2145204.2145225acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescscwConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

How did you feel during our conversation?: retrospective analysis of intercultural and same-culture instant messaging conversations

Published: 11 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Research has shown that intercultural communication can be more problematic than same-culture communication. In this study we use a technique called retrospective analysis in order to examine these problems in greater detail. American and Chinese participants discussed a crime story with either an American or a Chinese partner using Instant Messaging (IM). After the session, each participant reviewed the IM conversation in two-minute segments and rated it on several dimensions. Chinese participants reported significantly more problems than American participants, and partner culture affected all participants' feelings of annoyance. An analysis of the communication problems participants reported showed four themes: mismatched communication styles, differences in conversational focus, relationship-building issues, and problems with the IM medium. The results show how differences in communication styles can affect intercultural conversations and provide design suggestions for new tools to improve intercultural collaboration.

References

[1]
Ambady, N., Koo, J., Less, F., & Rosenthal, R. (1996). More than words: Linguistic and nonlinguistic politeness in two cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 996--1011.
[2]
Cegala, D. J., Savage, G. T., Brunner, C. C., & Conrad, A. (1982). An elaboration of the meaning of interaction involvement: Toward the development of a theoretical concept. Communication Monograghs, 49, 229--248.
[3]
Cegala, D. J. (1984). Affective and cognitive manifestations of interaction involvement during unstructured and competitive interactions. Communication Monograph, 51, 320--338.
[4]
Chen, L. (1995). Interaction involvement and patterns of topical talk: A comparison of intercultural and intracultural dyads. International journal of Intercultural Relations, 19, 463--482.
[5]
Clark, H. H., & Brennan, S. E. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. B. Resnick, R. M. Levine & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition. Washington DC: APA Press.
[6]
Cramton, C. D. (2001). The mutual knowledge problem and its consequences for dispersed collaboration. Organization Science, 12, 346--371.
[7]
Diamant, E. I., Fussell, S. R. & Lo, F. (2008). Where did we turn wrong?: unpacking the effect of culture and technology on attributions of team performance. Proc. CSCW 2008, 383--392.
[8]
Drummond, K. & Hopper, R. (1993a). Back channels revisited: acknowledgment tokens and speakership incipiency, 26, 2, 157--177.
[9]
Gill, A. J., French, R. M., Gergle, D., & Oberlander, J. (2008). The Language of Emotion in Short Blog Texts. Proceedings of CSCW 2008.
[10]
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
[11]
Gottman, J. M. & Levenson, R. W. (1985). A valid procedure for obtaining self-report of affect in marital interaction. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 53, 151--160.
[12]
Gudykunst, W. B., Matsumoto, Y., Ting-Toomey, S., Nishida, T., Kim, K., & Heyman, S. (1996). The influence of cultural individualism-collectivism, self construals, and individual values on communication styles across cultures. Human Comm. Research, 22, 510.
[13]
Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond culture. Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Press.
[14]
Hancock, J. T., Gee, K., Ciaccio, K. & Mae-Hwah Lin, J. M.-H. (2008). I'm sad you're sad: emotional contagion in CMC. Proceedings of CSCW '08.
[15]
Hart, S. G., & Staveland, L. E. (1988). Development of a multi-dimensional workload rating scale: Results of empirical and theoretical research. In P. A. Hancock & N. Meshkati (Ed.), Human mental workload (pp. 139--183). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
[16]
Heinz, B. (2003). Backchannel responses as strategic responses in bilingual speakers' conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 35, 1113--1142.
[17]
Hinds, P. & Kiesler, S. (2002). Distributed work. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[18]
Kelly, J. R., & Barsade, S. (2001). Emotions in small groups and work teams. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 86, 99--130.
[19]
Leshed, G., Hancock, J., Cosley, D., McLeod, P. & Gay, C. (2007). Feedback for guiding reflection on teamwork practices. Proc. GROUP 2007. 217--220.
[20]
Li, H. Z. (1999). Grounding and information communication in intercultural and intracultural dyadic discourse. Discourse Processes, 28, 195.
[21]
Li, H. Z. (2006). Backchannel responses as misleading feedback in intercultural discourse. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 35, 2, 99--116.
[22]
Lipnack, J. & Stamp, J. (1997). Virtual teams: Reaching Across Space, Time and Organizations with Technology. NY: John Wiley & Sons.
[23]
Littell, R., Milliken, G. A., Stroup, W. W., & Wolfinger, R. D. (1996). SAS system for mixed models. Cary, NC: SAS Institute.
[24]
Massey A. P., Hung, Y. C, Montoya-Weiss, M. & Ramesh, V., 2001. When culture and style aren't about clothes: perceptions of task-technology "fit" in global virtual teams. Procs. of GROUP '01, 207--213.
[25]
Setlock, L. D. & Fussell, S. R. (2010). What's it worth to you? The costs and affordances of CMC tools to Asian and American users. Proc. CSCW 2010, 341--350.
[26]
Setlock, L. D., Quinones, P. & Fussell, S. R. (2007). Does culture interact with media richness? The effects of audio vs. video conferencing on Chinese and American dyads. Proc. HICSS 2007, 13.
[27]
Setlock, L. D., Fussell, S. R. & Neuwirth, C. (2004). Taking it out of context: collaborating within and across cultures in face-to-face settings and via instant messaging. Proc. CSCW 2004, 604--613.
[28]
Ting-Toomey, S. (1988). Intercultural conflict styles: A face-negotiation theory. In Y. Y. Kim & W. Gudykunst (Eds.), Theories in intercultural communication (pp. 213--235). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
[29]
Villaume, W. A. & Cegala, D. J. (1988). Interaction involvement and discourse strategies: The patterned use of cohesive devices in conversation. Communication Monographs, 55, 20--40.
[30]
Wang, H., Fussell, S. F. & Setlock, L. D. (2009). Cultural difference and adaptation of communication styles in computer-mediated group brainstorming. Proc. CHI 2009, 669--678.
[31]
Wang, H. C., Rosé, C. P., et al. (2007). Thinking hard together: The long and short of collaborative idea generation for scientific inquiry. Proc. CSCL 2007.
[32]
Windsor, D. (2001). International virtual teams: Opportunities and issues. Advances in Interdisciplinary Studies of Work Teams, 8, 1--3.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)The Operationalization of Culture in HCICultures in Human-Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-30243-5_5(53-69)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2023
  • (2021)Challenges and Opportunities in the Design of Digital Distributed Affinity Diagramming ToolsProceedings of the 32nd European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics10.1145/3452853.3452871(1-5)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2021
  • (2021)Identifying Human Factors for Remote Guidance on Physical TasksCooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-88207-5_27(271-283)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2021
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 2012
1460 pages
ISBN:9781450310864
DOI:10.1145/2145204
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 February 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. cmc
  2. cross-culture communication
  3. retrospective analysis

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

CSCW '12
Sponsor:
CSCW '12: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 11 - 15, 2012
Washington, Seattle, USA

Acceptance Rates

CSCW '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 415 submissions, 40%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

CSCW '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)31
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)The Operationalization of Culture in HCICultures in Human-Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-30243-5_5(53-69)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2023
  • (2021)Challenges and Opportunities in the Design of Digital Distributed Affinity Diagramming ToolsProceedings of the 32nd European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics10.1145/3452853.3452871(1-5)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2021
  • (2021)Identifying Human Factors for Remote Guidance on Physical TasksCooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-88207-5_27(271-283)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2021
  • (2019)Judging Expertise Through Communication Styles in Intercultural CollaborationManagement Communication Quarterly10.1177/089331891882467433:2(238-271)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2019
  • (2017)Beyond Information ContentProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/31346831:CSCW(1-18)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2017
  • (2017)Facilitating Development of Pragmatic Competence through a Voice-driven Video Learning InterfaceProceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3025453.3025805(1431-1440)Online publication date: 2-May-2017
  • (2014)You're happy, I'm happyProceedings of HCI Korea10.5555/2729485.2729511(169-179)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2014
  • (2014)Verbal cues of involvement in dyadic same-culture and cross-culture instant messaging conversationsProceedings of the 5th ACM international conference on Collaboration across boundaries: culture, distance & technology10.1145/2631488.2631496(41-50)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2014
  • (2014)Using annotations in online group chatsProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2556288.2557209(863-866)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2014
  • (2014)Retrospective Analysis of Cognitive and Affective Responses in Intercultural and Intracultural ConversationsDiscourse Processes10.1080/0163853X.2014.94912152:3(226-253)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2014

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media