Communication accommodation in text messages: Exploring liking, power, and sex as predictors of textisms

ABSTRACT

This mixed-methods study applies Communication Accommodation Theory to explore how liking, power, and sex predict one’s likelihood for using textisms in digital interpersonal interactions. Textisms are digital cues that convey nonverbal meaning and emotion in text communication. The main experiment used a hypothetical texting scenario to manipulate textism amounts (none/many) and participant’s perceived power levels (low/equal/high) during texting interactions to examine the number of textisms participants used in subsequent responses in comparison to the number of textisms they viewed. Primary results show that (1) participants moderately converged to use similar amounts of textisms, and (2) those with low power who viewed many textisms were more likely to use textisms themselves during subsequent responses. Through the examination of adaption behaviors in text messaging, scholars can better understand the contexts in which users will include textisms to intentionally convey nonverbal meaning and emotion in digital communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital
• interpersonal
• nonverbal cues
• textisms
• text messaging

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Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/m8nd2/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/m8nd2/

Notes

1. This study’s materials including manipulations, measures, frequency tables, codebook and example text messages are documented in the appendices available on Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/m8nd2/