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168 Concetta Stewart, et al.

on the listserv, consisting of six Asians, one African, six African
Americans, one Latin American, and eight white Americans. There-
fore, given its diversity, this was thought to be an especially appro-
priate group for such a study as posed here.

Analysis
A complete transcription of the listserv discussions was collected for
one semester, or fifteen weeks, and consisted of over three hundred 1
messages. Included in these transcripts were message header infor-
2
mation such as sender, date and time, and subject , as well as the ac-
tual content of the messages. Multiple methods were used in the
analysis of these data. Patterns of interaction were studied by ex-
amining ratios of message frequency, message length, and rates of
adoption as well as language used and topics raised. A close reading
of the transcripts was conducted based on the notions of individual-
ism-collectivism in cultures (Hofstede 1983), high- and low-context
cultures (Hall 1976), “face work” (Ting-Toomey 1988) and genderlect
(Tannen 1990). These theories informed the analysis of the listserv
discussion as well as the examination of other cultural and gender
differences in the on-line communication process. For cultural com-
parisons, one group consisting of white Americans was categorized
as individualistic, while the other group consisting of African Amer-
ican, Latin American, Asian and African individuals was categorized
collectivistic. (For more details on this categorization scheme, see
Hofstede 1983.)

Results
Below are presented the results of the analyses including: message
frequency, message length, adoption rates and conversational
analysis.

MESSAGE FREQUENCY
The analysis shown in Table 1 supports finding of previous studies,
i.e., men sent more than twice as many messages in total as women,
with the men sending 204 messages as compared to the women who
sent 100 messages. The difference in volume here is more striking
when one considers that there were eleven women in the group and
nine men. The average number of messages per person by gender
perhaps makes this point more clearly, revealing 22.7 messages per