15
Eighty-five (45.7%) of the respondents were male while 98 (52.7%) were female,
and 3 (1.6%) did not respond. The average age of the participants was 20.1 years of age
(sd = 1.47). The ethnic composition of the participants was 76.3% European American,
9.7% African American (which is slightly lower than the 11% campus-wide), 1.6 %
Asian American, 0.5 Latino/a, 1.1% Native American (tribal membership not included),
3.3% responded as “other” (listing several ethnicities from the ethnicities included in the
questionnaire), and 14 (7.5%) students did not respond to the question. One hundred and
seventy-seven (95.2%) students were United States citizens.
Instrumentation
The three independent variables tested in the study are age of the sender,
relational level, and message strategy. The questionnaire consists of three major parts.
The first section is comprised of demographic questions about the research participants
that assess: age, sex, ethnicity, and the quality and type of contact with age peers and
older adults.
The second section of the study assesses the participant’s trait verbal
aggressiveness. Infante and Wigley’s (1986) Verbal Aggressiveness Scale consists of 20
items. The respondent’s trait verbal aggressiveness score is computed by recoding the
negatively worded items and then summing the respondent’s scores on the 5-point Likert
scale. Infante and Wigley found a reliability coefficient of .81 on the 20-item Verbal
Aggressiveness questionnaire. For the current study the Verbal Aggressiveness Scale had
an overall reliability across subjects of .85.
The final section of the questionnaire asks the participants to imagine themselves
in a scenario where three independent variables (age, relational level, and message
Convention