GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE USE OF CONVERSATIONAL STRATEGIES IN THE CONTEXT OF ALL-MALE AND ALL-FEMALE CONVERSATION

This research deals with gender differences of conversational strategies between
all-male and all-female conversations. The objectives of this research were: 1) to
describe how male and female speakers perform their conversational strategies in
conversation and 2) to elaborate the factors affecting performance of male and
female’s conversational strategies in the conversation. This research was
conducted by using qualitative descriptive method. The data in this research were
participants’ utterances which contain features of conversational strategies taken
from recorded conversations of all-male and all-female conversations. The source
of data was four male and three male speakers. The instruments used for
collecting the data were a recorder to record the conversation, documentary sheets
which contain the transcription of the utterances, and interview sheets which
contain some questions to find more detail information about participants’ opinion
about factors that affect their conversational strategies. The data were analyzed by
using interactive model by Miles, Huberman, and Saldana (2014). The findings
showed that: 1) Conversational strategies in both of all-male and all-female
conversations similarly performed in a collaborative way in which minimal
response was the dominant strategy used in both group conversations which
comprise of 33.3% in all-male group conversations while 35.13% in all-female
group conversation and 2) There were four factors affecting similar conversational
strategies in all-male and all-female conversations, namely: purpose of
communication, familiarity among participants, topic being discussed, and context
of the conversation.