Key Terms in Intercultural Communication Studies

Posted on Feb 1, 2025 in Social sciences

Key Terms in Intercultural Communication

Anglocentrism: Using Anglo or white cultural standards as the criteria for interpretations and judgments of behaviors and attitudes.
Diversity: The quality of being different.
Ethnocentrism: The tendency to think that our own culture is superior to other cultures.
Global Village: A term used by McLuhan in the 1960s that refers to a world in which communication technology unites people in remote parts of the world.
Self-reflexivity: A process of learning to understand oneself and one’s position in society.
Afrocentricity: An orientation toward African or African American cultural standards, including beliefs and values, as the criteria for interpreting behaviors and attitudes.
Collectivistic: The tendency to focus on the goals, needs, and views of the in-group rather than individuals’ own goals, needs, and views.

Communication Accommodation Theory: The view that individuals adjust their verbal communication to facilitate understanding.
Conceptual Equivalence: The similarity of linguistic terms and meanings across cultures.
Cross-cultural Training: Training people to become familiar with other cultural norms and to improve their interactions with people of different domestic and international cultures.
Diffusion of Innovations Theory: The view that communication and relationships play important roles in how new ideas are adopted (or not) by individuals and groups.
Diversity Training: The training meant to facilitate intercultural communication among various gender, ethnic, and racial groups in the United States.
Ethnography: A discipline that examines the patterned interactions and significant symbols of specific cultural groups to identify the cultural norms that guide their behaviors, usually based on field studies.
Face Negotiation Theory: The view that cultural groups vary in preferences for conflict styles and face-saving strategies.
Intercultural Competence: The ability to behave effectively and appropriately in interacting across cultures.

Paradigm: A framework that serves as the worldview of researchers. Different paradigms assume different interpretations of reality, human behavior, culture, and communication.
Perception: The process by which individuals select, organize, and interpret external and internal stimuli to create their view of the world.
Postcolonialism: An intellectual, political, and cultural movement that calls for the independence of colonized states and also liberation from colonialist ways of thinking.
Qualitative Methods: Research methods that attempt to capture people’s own meanings for their everyday behavior in specific contexts. These methods use participant observation and field studies.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The assumption that language shapes our ideas and guides our view of social reality.
Translation Equivalence: The linguistic sameness that is gained after translating and back-translating research materials several times using different translators.

Social Science Approach: See Functionalist Approach.
Dialogical Approach: Focuses on the importance of dialogue in developing and maintaining relationships between individuals and communities.
Critical Approach: A theoretical approach that includes many assumptions of the interpretive approach but focuses more on macro-contexts, such as the political and social structures that influence communication.
Dialectic Approach: An approach to intercultural communication that integrates three approaches—functionalist (social science), interpretive, and critical—in understanding culture and communication. It recognizes and accepts that the three approaches are interconnected and sometimes contradictory.
Functionalist Approach: Also called the social science approach, based on the assumptions that aim to identify and explain cultural variations in communication and to predict future communication.
Interpretive Approach: An approach to intercultural communication that aims to understand and describe human behavior within specific cultural groups based on the assumptions that 1) human experience is subjective, 2) human behavior is creative rather than determined or easily predicted, and 3) culture is created and maintained through communication.