I'm not looking to code messages categorically (e.g., Brown & Levinson's typology of politeness strategies), but rather to have participants rate their own degree of politeness utilized in a given relationship over time. So far, I've not been able to track down any multi-item measures of self-reported global politeness. Any help or references would be appreciated!
Tim, I don' t know of any such measure, but if you find one, I hope you'll share the wealth :-) Lisa Guntzviller and I created some items to measure the goal of being polite during an interaction -- those might provide a starting point for something focused on longer term behavior. (Comm. Monographs, 2013). I also like the politeness items in Jenkins and Dragojevic (Com Research, 2011). Like other politeness scales I'm aware of, they were focused on perceptions of messages, but it's a larger item set that could be a good foundation for a different measure.
You can probably use the agreeableness scale from the 5-factor personality scale. It is often understood as a personality predisposition tendency to be "nice and agreeable to others" which is basically the essence of politeness.
Thanks so much for the references, Erina! If I do run across something, I will definitely share :)
Political correctness is a form of politeness. It might be too specific for what you need, but you could refer to: Blanton & Strauts. (2015). That's Not Funny: Instrument Development and Validation of the Concern for Political Correctness Scale
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272021684_That%27s_Not_Funny_Instrument_Development_and_Validation_of_the_Concern_for_Political_Correctness_Scale
Article That's Not Funny: Instrument Development and Validation of t...
Timothy, my colleagues and I (Renee Edwards and others) have successfully made use of a number of items derived in part from the work of Trees and Manusov (1998, in Human Communication Research) to measure perceptions of another's politeness. However, these items could be easily adapted to measure perceptions of one's own politeness in a relationship. The number of items we have used has varied from five to eight, but perhaps the best version for combining succinctness and internally reliability was in an article published in Communication Quarterly (Bello, Brandau-Brown, & Ragsdale, 2008--see my list of publications for the full-text of this article). This version consisted of six items. In the CQ article, I believe that only one is given as an example, but I would be happy to email all of them to you. Just let me know...
Hi Richard,
Thanks for pointing me toward this! We've begun developing a set of multi-item politeness measures based on Brown & Levinson's categories, but I would very much appreciate if you could send a copy of the items you developed. Thanks!
- Tim
Richard, would you also be willing to share your items with me? [email protected]
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