Influences of Culture on Self-Disclosure as Relationally Situated in Intercultural and Interracial Friendships from a Social Penetration Perspective

Abstract

Intercultural and interracial relationships face barriers, tensions, and challenges that are absent from intracultural and intraracial relationships. These challenges provide the impetus for this study to examine the influences of individualism-collectivism and relational intimacy on topics and dimensions of self-disclosure in intercultural/interracial friendships from a social penetration perspective. A total of 252 participants responded to the instruments measuring the constructs of interest. This study found: (1) relational intimacy was positively correlated with all six topics and four out of the five dimensions of self-disclosure; (2) individualism was a significant predictor of the five dimensions of self-disclosure as a set; and (3) one mirrors one's intercultural/interracial friend in all six topics and the positive/negative dimension of self-disclosure. These results suggest that relational intimacy has a greater impact on close intercultural and interracial friendships than cultural variability.

Keywords:

• Self-disclosure
• Social Penetration
• Intercultural and Interracial Friendships
• Relational Intimacy
• Cultural Variability

Notes

[1] The self-construal scale is another widely used measurement of culture in cross-cultural and intercultural communication research. However, recent debates regarding the validity of self-construal scales prevent the authors from adopting it (see Levine et al., 2003).

[2] One may wonder whether the set of data on participants’ friends’ self-disclosure should have been obtained actually from their friends. Instead, it was decided to obtain both sets of data (i.e., participants’ own and their friends’ self-disclosure) from the participants themselves to maximize the magnitude of the relationship between these sets of data (monotrait-monomethod correlations; Furr & Bacharach, 2007). Future studies will obtain both types of data sets from both participants and their friends to see how similar or different their perception would be from their friends’ opinions (monotrait-heteromethod correlations).

[3] Factor analyses tables are available from the first author.

[4] “Inconsistency” between the two versions (i.e., Item 16 was excluded from one's own version but not from the other version) was allowed because of an interest in selecting items that would optimally capture the constructs of self-disclosure. Making items consistent between the two versions (i.e., both versions have exactly the same items) would have resulted in excluding items with high factor loadings.

[5] To test whether racial/ethnic backgrounds themselves, independent of individual differences in intercultural/racial friendship or individualism/collectivism, would affect self-disclosure, a new independent variable was created—ethnicity—by combining Caucasians/White with Spanish-Americans (European White, n = 118), and combining the other groups (non-White, n = 134).