Communication in family disputes (surveying American and Vietnamese movies)

Abstract

This thesis aims at yielding insights into the way American and Vietnamese people communicate during their family disputes, to find out similarities and differences between these two cultures in terms of disputing topics, escalation strategies and termination strategies. Based on Hofstede’s (1990, 2001, 2010) theoretical framework of cultural dimensions, specifically Power distance, Individualism- Collectivism, Masculinity- Femininity, the study has identified impact of these dimensions on disputing stages between family members: initiation, escalation and termination. “Dispute” in the thesis has been conceptualized as a dynamic interactional process which inaugurates with “arguable utterance- initial opposition” model, then progresses with mutual oppositions between disputants and ends with certain termination formats. The thesis puts emphasis on analyzing two pairs of family relationships in American and Vietnamese movies: parent-child, and husband-wife. They, in ages of 16-60, all live in urban areas. Cross-cultural, cross-linguistic and discourse analysis approaches are combined to analyze data of movie dialogues. Data analysis has been implemented on a revised and combined analytical framework suggested by Eisenberg & Garvey (1981), Maynard (1985), Hutchby (1996) and Vuchinich (1987,1990). From totally 4880 minutes of American movies and 5320 minutes of Vietnamese movies, the author categorized and selected 310 family disputes as samples. Qualitative and quantitative methods are integrated to figure out a panorama of family disputes in two cultures. The thesis has fulfilled the task of exploring the most common disputing topics and strategies that American and Vietnamese family members apply to achieve their goals in each disputing stage. The language used for each strategy and cultural factors that affect strategies’ verbalization formats are also identified. Hence, the similarities and differences between two languages and two cultures are disclosed. Researching on family disputes provides a more comprehensive view of human communication, which is not only formed by consensus but also confrontation. This thesis’s results, therefore, are beneficial to understand cultures and also have particular merit for cross-cultural studies and foreign language learning.