Dimensions of Interpersonal Communication

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Abstract
We report some results from a study whose primary aim was to explore the conceptual structures people implicitly use in comparing and describing different kinds of interpersonal communication. The focus of this research is on two variables that are likely to affect the way people communicate and interact with each other – the relationship between them and the particular situational context. The part of the study which is reported here is based on ratings of hypothetical communication episodes on numerous bipolar scales. Multidimensional scaling analyses of the data revealed five dimensions interpreted as “Cooperative and Friendly vs. Competitive and Hostile,” “Intense vs. Superficial,” “Autocratic vs. Democratic,” “Formal vs. Informal,” and Task Oriented vs. Non-task Oriented. The relative importance of the interpersonal relation and the situational context for evaluations of the communication episodes on each dimension are discussed.