Native American and Anglo use of compliance-gaining strategies /

Abstract

The findings uncover some important information which hopefully will stimulate researchers to investigate populations in other locales in the continental United States. The results are offered with the assumption they are generalizable to at least the four, and presumably more, situations used in this study in a Significant Other and an Insignificant Other context. This study examines Native Americans and Anglos as they approach compliance-gaining situations. The functional approach presupposes intentionality in which a communicator constructs a message intended to bring about a specific goal. The research is concerned with the attempts of people to exert verbal control over other people. Forty-eight Native Americans (representing twenty-one tribes) and forty-eight Anglos completed questionnaires. The results confirm that Native Americans and Anglos do use different "sets of rules" for expressing themselves appropriately in the same situations. While the sample cannot be considered representative of the general population, it cuts across the age, academics, areas of interest, and tribes. Therefore, the results should also be generalizable to the tribes investigated by, and participating in, this study, and presumably more.