This study examined intercultural friendship development through analysis of in-depth interviews. While extant literature on friendship development has examined friends from the same cultural background, interviewees in the current study (N ¼ 30) described relationships with friends from cultures different than their own. Analysis revealed four factors that respondents felt influenced the development of their intercultural friendship; targeted socializing, cultural similarities, cultural differences, and prior intercultural experience. Results also indicate several ways in which communication both enables and hinders the development of intercultural friendships, providing evidence of the uniqueness and complexity of communication in these relationships.Scholars have paid scant attention to intercultural friendships despite their clear importance and frequency in the increasingly multicultural world. Intercultural friendships represent an intimate intersection between personal and cultural aspects of communication processes and the difficulty in teasing them out might be one reason why they receive so little research attention. Qualitative methods lend themselves particularly well to understanding the subjective experience and how it is shaped by personal and cultural factors. This study examined intercultural friendship development through an analysis of in-depth interviews.
Muted group theory is the basic idea, articulated by anthropologists Ardener and Ardener, that in every society there are cultural groups who are traditionally muted—given less access than members of the dominant groups to public discourse and to having their individual and community concerns heard. This included four basic ideas: (a) that identity and reality are socially constructed; (b) that communication is the means for that construction; (c) that members of muted groups must adjust to the dominant ways of communication to get their voices heard; and (d) that resistance and change are possible. While originally this was used to explain gender differences, it has been applied to other identity groups, including racial identity.
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