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...nonaccommodative younger people, younger adults felt more obliged to be polite to, and respectful of, the former than their peer age group. Young adults were also avoidant of communication with older people. Overall, young Americans reported their intergenerational communicative encounters to be more positive than both young Thais and Japanese. Young Thai people reported the highest levels of respect/obligation and avoidant communication among young people of the three cultures, and found older Thais to be particularly nonaccommodative. Cultural and modernity issues were invoked to account for these findings.
The social psychology of intergroup relations has demonstrated that as individuals strive for a positive social identity and enhanced self-esteem, they engage in social comparisons whereby they favor one's own ingroup over other outgroups (see, Tajfel & Turner, 1986). This ingroup bias has been documented in the intercultural (e.g., Gallois, Giles, Jones, Cargile, & Ota, 1995; Gudykunst et al., 1992) and organizational (e.g., Gardner, Paulsen, Gallois, Callan, & Monaghan, 2001; McCann & Giles, 2002) communication domains, and has also been making a strong foray into the intergenerational communication literature (e.g., Harwood, Giles, & Ryan, 1995; Williams & Nussbaum, 2001). Much of this work has been guided by communication accommodation theory (CAT; e.g., Giles, Mulac, Bradac, & Johnson, 1987). In CAT, it is argued that people adjust their communication behaviors (often mediated by stereotypes) in ways that reflect their desire to belong to, or differentiate themselves from, various groups (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991), and also to attend the needs of the addressees (Coupland, Coupland, Giles, & Henwood, 1988). Individuals may accommodate their communication behavior to that of others if they wish to show unity with other ingroup members, or to facilitate communication with them. Alternatively, they may choose to nonaccommodate in order to differentiate themselves communicatively from outgroup members and, at other times, to avoid communication with them. The extent to which individuals find it easy to communicate across group boundaries, however, can be culturally conditioned (Gudykunst, Yoon, & Nishida, 1987; Triandis, 1995).
In line with the basic tenets of CAT, research suggests that people of different adult generations may communicate in ways that are biased in favor of their own age group and not the other age group (Harwood et al., 1995). For example, young adults (i.e., aged 17-29 years) tend to negatively stereotype older adults (i.e., those aged 65 years and above) (Hummert, Garstka, Shaner, & Strahm, 1994; Kite & Johnson, 1988), speak to older people in patronizing ways (Giles, Fox, & Smith, 1993; Ryan & Cole, 1990) and, in general, feel that their intergenerational conversations are more dissatisfying and less positive than their intragenerational encounters (Williams & Giles, 1996). Some of the roots of this dissatisfaction have been unearthed in studies which demonstrate that young adults view their older conversational partners as over-parenting, disapproving, and "not listening" (Giles & Williams, 1994), overly loquacious (Obler & Albert, 1981), and incoherently verbose (Gold, Arbuckle, & Andres, 1994). Further, older adults may be perceived to talk in a manner that alienates younger people, discourages intergenerational contact, and provides conversational management difficulties for younger speakers (Coupland, Coupland, Giles, Henwood, & Wiemann, 1988). On the other side of the intergenerational coin, American and Australian older adults have also been found to display an in-group bias (i.e., higher levels of ingroup accommodation) in favor of communicating with their peer age group (Noels, Giles, Cai, & Turay, 1999; Noels, Giles, Gallois, & Ng, 2001). Given this seemingly enormous gulf between younger and older adults in their intergenerational talk, Coupland, Coupland, and Giles (1991) conclude that "... younger and older people may find themselves conversing across a cultural divide, predisposed by their predictably varying social experiences, social attitudes and priorities for interaction" (p. 152).
Most of the foregoing intergenerational research in communication has been conducted from a young adult's perspective, and primarily with Anglo-European participants from Canada, Britain, Australia, and the U.S.A. Therefore, a study such as this one, which is conducted in both Western and Asian settings, is important as it enables us to see if the conclusions drawn in Western societies hold true cross-culturally. Moreover, such comparisons may point to cultures where intergenerational interactions are more positive and, hence, provide ideas for solutions to them.
This study seeks to advance previous research on intergenerational communication perceptions in two ways. First, it extends current research on intergenerational communication to Southeast Asia, a region of the Pacific Rim that differs from much of Confucian-influenced East Asia (e.g., Japan, China, Korea) in that its views on aging derive from different religio-philosophical traditions (e.g., Theravada Buddhism). Thailand, and Southeast Asia as a whole, is grossly underrepresented in communication research. In fact, literature reviews (in both English and Thai) attest that there is almost no intergenerational, and little interpersonal, communication data existing that deals with people from Thailand (see, however, Knutson, Komolsevin, Chatiketu, & Smith, 2003; Sriussadapoorn-Charoenngam & Jablin, 1999, for studies on Thai rhetorical sensitivity and Thai communication competence in an organizational context, respectively). This study, then, represents an important first step in filling this research lacuna. Additional studies in Laos and Vietnam, Thailand's Southeast Asian neighbors, are also underway by the authors.
Second, the three cultures examined in this study, Thailand, Japan, and the U.S.A., are quite appealing for comparative purposes in that, as alluded to before, they are characterized by differing economic, religious, philosophical, and socio-cultural traditions (see also Georgas & Berry, 1995). Thailand, for its part, is a largely Theravada Buddhist (over 95% of the population) (Central Intelligence Agency, 2001), newly-industrialized, collectivistic (Hofstede, 1984; McCann & Honeycutt, 2003; Sorod, 1991), and an extremely hierarchical (Hofstede; Komin, 2000; Mulder, 1996) Southeast Asian country, while Japan is typically described as more economically-developed, yet similarly collectivistic and group-oriented (Hofstede, 1991; Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk, & Gelfand, 1995). Unlike Buddhist Thailand, Japan is more influenced by Shinto, Taoist, and Confucian thought, although the influence of Buddhism is not completely disregarded (Georgas & Berry; Ishii, 1992).
In contrast to these two "Eastern" cultures, the United States is a largely Christian culture (roughly 77% of the population; see Kosmin & Mayer, 2001), and is typically portrayed as vertically-oriented (Triandis, 1995; Weldon, 1984), individualistic (Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey, & Chua, 1988; Hofstede, 1991), and economically-developed. Although these contrastive value and behavioral patterns are themselves regarded as empirically contentious in some quarters (e.g., Kagitcibasi, 1994; Schwartz, 1990), we feel the religio-philosophical orientations of these cultures can still play an important part in our understanding of its members attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors (see Chang, 1997; Kim & Yamaguchi, 1995; Oliver, 1971; Yum, 1988).
The aforementioned broad socio-, religio-philosophical tendencies of the nations (e.g., collectivism, Confucianism) may form a basis for the emergence of cultural difference in intergenerational communication. In addition, central to the study of intergenerational relations is the notion of filial piety (e.g., Ho, 1994; Sung, 1995), a Confucian-based doctrine (which the Chinese refer to as xiao) that focuses on care and respect for the aged. Filial piety, as a concept, is shared as a moral norm in a number of cultures, though it is most commonly reported in Asian contexts (Gallois et al., 1999). According to the filial piety perspective on intergenerational communication, older adults are viewed positively and respected (e.g., source of wisdom and magical power), and offer various types of resources to people in the younger generations, while younger people, in return, observe their elders and provide care and support when needed (Rim & Yamaguchi, 1995; Sung, 2001). From this, one might predict that older people in Asian cultures would be viewed more positively and that the communication climate between younger and older adults would be one of accommodation. This, however, has not been the case, with recent studies yielding results that suggest that intergenerational interactions may be at least different, if not more problematic, in some Asian countries than in Western countries (e.g. Giles, Harwood, Pierson, Clement, & Fox, 1998; Giles, McCann, Ota, & Noels, 2002). It has been suggested that this problematic intergenerational climate may be in part due to changes in family structure, modernization, and westernization, and particularly importantly, the general erosion of filial piety throughout Asia (Chow, 1999; Fei, 1985; Sung, 2000).
A study by Williams et al. (1997), perhaps the most extensive work to date on cross-cultural intergenerational communication, has also produced results that suggest that communicating with older people may be a more positive experience in the West than in the East. In this study, Williams and associates explored young people's perceptions of their interactions with older people who were not family members in four Western countries (the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and in five East Asian countries (The Philippines, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China [PRC], South Korea, and Japan). Williams et al. found that older adults were viewed as less accommodating, that interactions with older people were viewed as largely dissatisfying, that age "mattered more" in Eastern cultures than it did in Western cultures, and that perceptions of intergenerational communication experiences were, in general, less favorable in the East than in the West.
In related follow-up studies, the views of young Anglo-Americans and Anglo-Australians were contrasted respectively with Taiwanese and Hong Kong respondents...
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