A Contrastive Study of Compliment Responses across Gender: The Turkish Context
A Contrastive Study of Compliment Responses across Gender: The Turkish Context

Summary/Abstract: Compliments and compliment responses (CRs) are one of the complex dimensions of every day communication. Like many other means of interaction, they demonstrate various patterns across different nationalities, age or gender groups. Investigating such behaviors offers a way to understand different tendencies in social relationships. This study investigated CR patterns across male and female students at a state university in Turkey. Fifty participants were asked to fill in Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT) in which four situations (appearance, character, ability, and possession) were designed to elicit macro and micro CR strategies. In addition, some excerpts from the participants’ social media accounts were analyzed to see their response patterns in authentic data. Findings showed that although there were minor differences, both groups mostly preferred Accept strategies followed by Evade, with very few Reject strategies in all situations at the macro level. Another finding was that female students used more combination strategies when compared to male students, which might indicate that women make more effort while responding to compliments.

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