Development of the intercultural willingness to communicate scale

The purpose of this research was to investigate whether or not people vary in their willingness to engage in intercultural interactions. To explore this possibility the Intercultural Willingness to Communicate Scale was developed. The 12-item scale was administered to a sample of 390 undergraduate students. A unidimensional factor structure emerged with a high alpha (.91). Two hypotheses were offered to generate evidence of validity for the measure. Results indicated that people high in intercultural willingness to communicate reported having significantly more friends from foreign countries than people low in intercultural willingness to communicate. Results abo indicated that intercultural and intracultural willingness to communicate correlated moderately, indicating that the constructs are in fact related, but not redundant.