“Wow! You Look Stunning!”: A Cross-Cultural Study of Compliment Responses Among Tribal Filipino Youth

Abstract

This qualitative – phenomenological study aimed to examine the different compliment responses employed by Mandaya, Manobo, and Bagobo Filipino tertiary students. The data were collected through in-depth interview and written discourse completion task (DCT) wherein a total of 30 Filipino tertiary students participated in this study; 12 underwent indepth interview while 18 answered the DCT. Using the Miles and Huberman framework, data revealed that participants opted to follow the trend from previous researches: accept, reject, and mitigate patterns. However new schemes were also revealed in the micro level, such as the intensifying response and reject + comment. It was also revealed that both Mandaya and Bagobo participants mostly preferred mitigate strategies. On the contrary, the Manobo participants used the accept strategy. Results also showed that all participants preferred opting-out strategy of the Mitigate macro level. Further studies are warranted.