Communication strategies for role invention

The research questions asked in this study were: What communication strategies are used by persons in the process of role invention? Which of these communication strategies are perceived by the actors as being most satisfying to themselves? Data were gathered by means of a survey of persons whose social situation required the invention of a role for which there were no social norms. Factor analysis identified five strategies: “deliberately dissimilar,”; “actively friendly,”; “authoritative,”; “non‐adaptive,”; and “indifferent. “Also included in the survey was a measure of communication satisfaction. Correlations between each strategy and the measure of satisfaction showed a significant positive relation between communication satisfaction and the “actively friendly”; and “authoritarian”; strategies, and a significant negative correlation with the “indifferent”; strategy.

Notes

Mr. Vause is a doctoral student and Mr. Wiemann is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of Speech, University of California, Santa Barbara.