gender & interruptions

[Gisela Redeker]

In response to my introduction earlier this week, where I gave a
list of my research interests, Thomas Murphy asked:

On 11 Jan 99 at 15:24, Thomas Murphy wrote:
> What do you mean by gender and interruptions?

A colleague and I have done a couple of studies investigating the
often-heard claim that men tend to interrupt women more than vice
versa. We found that many studies failed to take into account two
important factors: (i) the fact that men often talk more in an
interaction than their female interlocutors, and (ii) that not all
overlapping talk is interrupting (cf. the excellent review article
by James & Clarke 1993).

Wrt point (i), we used "interruptions per minute of the partner's/
partners' speaking time", i.e., an index that takes into account how
much opportunity any speaker had to interrupt the talk of any one (or
all) of the interlocutors. Wrt point (ii), we used an adaptation of
Roger, Bull & Smith's (1988) interruption coding system,
differentiating co-operative overlaps and various more or less
interruptive kinds of simultaneous talk.

In one study (published only in Dutch), we found men to be quite
dominant (in terms of amount of talk and interrupting) in Dutch
tv-discussions. We suspected, however, that power differences (as
*perceived* by the interlocutors) may have played a role here. In a
second study, analyzing formal and informal discussions among
befriended academics, we found no differences in quantity of talk or
frequency of interrupting (in total in or any male/female
combination). There were quite interesting qualitative differences,
however, between mixed-gender and men-only/women-only discussions.

References:
James, D., & Clarke, S. (1993). Women, men, and interruptions: a
     critical review. In: D. Tannen (ed.), _Gender and Conversational
     Interaction_ (pp. 231-280). New York: Oxford University Press.
Redeker, G. & Maes, A. (1996). Gender differences in interruptions.
     In: Dan I. Slobin, Julie Gerhardt, Amy Kyratzis, &
     Jiansheng Guo (eds.) _Social Interaction, Social Context and
     Language. Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp_ (pp. 597-612).
     Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Roger, D.B., Bull, P.E., & Smith, S. (1988). the development of a
     comprehensive system for classifying interruptions. _Journal
     of Language and Social Psychology_, 7, 27-34.

| Gisela Redeker, Professor, Dept. of Language and Communication |
| University of Groningen,  P.O.Box 716,  NL-9700 AS Groningen   |
| tel:  +31-50-3635973/-5858     fax:  +31-50-3636855            |
| e-mail: G.Redeker at let.rug.nl   http://www.let.rug.nl/~redeker/ |