DePaul Communication Preferences

Technology has been advancing at a fast rate and has been complicating means of communication for all people. The introduction of many new ways of communicating is also increasing the amount of communication humans do non-verbally, that is, through text messaging, instant messaging, social networks, etc. Some have said that soon, humans will become incapable of communicating in person. Research in the past, through the means of surveys, has revealed that women use non-verbal technology as their preferred method of communication. Also, verbal communication, simply face-to-face, is becoming an issue as humans are becoming more and more incapable. Therefore, people are resorting to using technologies that allow us to avoid face-to-face communications.

Our hypotheses predict that DePaul students communicate more non-verbally than they do verbally, DePaul students prefer text messaging as their main source of communication, female students tend to communicate using non-verbal technologies more than males, and College of Communication students have the highest number of users of verbal technologies (i.e. face-to-face, talking on the phone, video messaging). The questions we wrote for the survey focused on gender, ethnicity, and school enrolled in. As well as, the types of communication students prefer and why the students think they communicate the way they do. When pilot testing, we discovered we needed to be a little more clear with directions in a few areas. For a couple questions, students were confused how to answer, so we added directions to the question. We made sure to define all terms that may have been confusing to the students. Limitations we expect mainly are complications with generalizing results. We are surveying a small group that may contain biases; therefore we may not results that would necessarily pertain to the DePaul community as a whole.

In terms of demographics, 59.3% of partcipants were female and 40.7% of participants were male. The majority of students who took our surbey were Caucasian. In terms of our hypotheses-related results, we got data that supported 2 of our hypotheses and the other two supported our null hypotheses. We were correct in saying that overall, DePaul students spend more time communicating nonverbally than they do verballuy or face to face. We were also correct in saying that DePaul students tend to use text messaging to communicate the most out of all the means of communication. The data we recieved from our survey tended to show that DePaul students who are male communicate morethrough means of nonverbal technology than students who are female.

As technology keeps advancing, we always want to have that new thing thats gonna help us communicate that much faster and that much simpler. We live in a "we want it now" society and everything that adds to that, such as that brand new iphone, or that tablet that allows us to do everything with the simple touch of our hands. DePaul students are no different. Everyone is so attatched to the technologies our society has brought upon us that the way people communicate is quickly changing. We no longer only see the traditional phone conversation, now we see texting, chatting, and emailing as something that is prefered as a means of communication.

DePaul Communication Preferences

June 4, 2011