Exploring Cross-Cultural Self-Disclosure of Women Facebook Users

Abstract

Anchored on Altman and Taylor’s Social Penetration Theory and Hall’s Iceberg Model of Culture, this study was conducted to explore selfdisclosure among women from two actively involved countries on Facebook, India and the Philippines. This study analyzed the breadth (range of topics) and depth (degree of intimacy) of Facebook self-disclosure and proceeded to compare the two nationalities’ public and private disclosures. The respondents of the study were 3 Filipinas and 3 Indians. The corpora used as data were the respondents’ Facebook profiles, status updates, and transcripts of Messenger interviews. Research questions were answered through qualitative content analysis. Based on the findings of the analysis, the following are concluded: (1) Sharing a wide variety of topics and more intimate levels of information is the main route to social penetration; (2) Selfdisclosure is culturally driven. Although Filipinas and Indians tend to disclose few similar types of information publicly, they still vary on the amount of information divulged. Indians are more restricted than the Filipinas; and (3) What we see in people in social media such as Facebook are just their external cultures. To know more about people’s deep cultures, engaging in communication and building relationships with them are the keys.