COMM 2303 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Proxemics, Communication Accommodation Theory

• School: Northeastern University
• Department: Communication Studies
• Course: COMM 2303
• Professor: Margaret Williams

Document Summary

Intimate space, personal space, social space, public space. Linguists helped to identify problems with direct translations losing their original intended meaning. Anthropologists brought an understanding of cultural differences to the field. Describes reality as something that is external to us and acts as the basis for measurement. Understanding human behaviour as something that is describable and predictable. Quantitative procedures such as surveys and content analyses are used to measure culture. Helps us identify variations between cultural groups. Creates quantitative data that can be used to create a big picture view. Humans by nature are unpredictable, so sometimes predictions can be wrong. Reality is not only externally constructed; it can be internally created too. There may be a lack of cultural sensitivity due to the broad scope of the research. People in individualist versus collectivist cultures have different strategies for reducing uncertainty in initial encounters.