FRAMING SOCIAL-REALITY - THE RELEVANCE OF RELATIONAL JUDGMENTS

Relational communication researchers have asserted that dominance and affiliation are the fundamental features of social reality. The author s argue that when individuals interpret interaction, they focus on one dimension or the other, such that dominance and affiliation are diffe rentially salient. On that premise, the authors hypothesized that the relative salience of dominance or affiliation would be a function of t he goal-defined context. Further some investigators have argued that t he notion of involvement is also essential to the study of relational communication. Although the authors concur, they believe that involvem ent is a fundamentally different type of construct than dominance or a ffiliation. The authors hypothesized that involvement is relevant to b oth dominance and affiliation judgments; it functions as an intensifie r variable. A study was conducted in which participants rated the rele vance of a series of word pairs that operationalized dominance, affili ation, and involvement within 12 interaction scenarios. Although there was evidence that the biological sex of the judge moderated the magni tude of some effects, the results were uniformly supportive of the hyp otheses.