Impression Management And Communication Effectiveness During Cross-cultural Contact

Rare researches about impression management and communication effectiveness in cross-cultural field are reported so far. This research focuses on college students, aims to describe the present cross-cultural contact situation and explore the relationships among cross-cultural contact, cross-cultural impression management and cross-cultural communication effectiveness.12interviewees were interviewed to explore what kind of impression management tactics the college students use during the cross-cultural contact, and how they define cross-cultural communication effectiveness. Cross-cultural impression management questionnaire and cross-cultural communication effectiveness questionnaire with good reliability and validity were made up based on deep interviews and correlative literatures. The cross-cultural impression management questionnaire includes four factors:focus on others, active explaination, identity monitor and ingratiate. The cross-cultural communication effectiveness questionnaire includes two factors:obvious effectiveness and nonverbal information. Data were analyzed through SPSS and AMOS, and the results were:1) the cross-cultural contact of college students was still relative infrequent and superficial,2) impression management tactics were used during cross-cultural contact and the cross-cultural communication effectiveness were good on the whole,3) communication effectiveness could be predicted by impression management tactics to a certain degree,4) there were significant differences on cross-cultural impression management and cross-cultural communication effectiveness between genders and different abroad experiences,5) there was no significant difference among different majors,6) and no significant differences between age groups and education background groups,7) on the whole, the more cross-cultural contact occured, the more impression management tactics were used and the better communication effectiveness was.