Gender-Based Differences in Compliment Responses Among Jordanian University Students

Abstract

The current study aims at exploring the difference between male and female Jordanian university students with regard to their compliment responses on Facebook. It also investigates the difference between male and female Jordanian university students when they respond to compliments offered by the opposite sex. The study is based on a corpus consisting of 233 compliment responses collected from responses to comments on Facebook posts. The data analysis was based on Herbert’s (1986) taxonomy of compliment response strategies. Findings of this research show that both male and female Jordanian university students tended to use the agreement strategies more frequently than the non-agreement and other interpretation strategies. The findings also show that although both male and female students use the agreement strategies more frequently, there are also differences in the use of the sub-categories of the agreement strategy among them. Results of the study also indicated that the Jordanian culture, norms, and expectations, as well as the relationship between the complimenter and the complimentee, accounted for the very limited number of compliments on appearance and compliment responses that occurred between two students of different genders.