Influence of Nationality and Profession on Intercultural Sensitivity
国籍与职业对跨文化敏感度的影响

A survey of 833 college English major and non-English major students as well as multinational employees from China's Mainland and Thailand was conducted.In this study,independent variables include nationality and profession;dependent variable is intercultural sensitivity,which is conceptualized as consisting of five dimensions,namely,interaction engagement,respect for cultural differences,interaction confidence,interaction enjoyment,and interaction attentiveness.Scale examples of each dimension are as follows: Interaction engagement: I enjoy interacting with people from different cultures;Respect for cultural differences: I think people from other cultures are narrow-minded;Interaction confidence: I am pretty sure of myself in interacting with people from different cultures;Interaction enjoyment: I get upset easily when interacting with people from different cultures;Interaction attentiveness: I am very observant when interacting with people from different cultures.Major results of multivariate analysis of variance indicate that Chinese subjects had a significantly higher level of intercultural sensitivity than Thai subjects.The between-subjects differences show that English major students and multinational employees had a significantly higher level of intercultural sensitivity than non-English major students.The results of this study imply that foreign language learning experience is equally important to the building of intercultural sensitivity as is intercultural communication experience.The interaction effect of nationality and profession was not discovered from data analysis.Although data analysis did not generate an ideal model(R~2=0.098),from the various levels of intercultural sensitivity of the subjects,we can clearly see the possible impact of foreign language competence on intercultural sensitivity.Both the English major students of China and Thailand have higher levels of intercultural sensitivity.This fact suggests that language learning,especially foreign language learning is positively related with intercultural sensitivity.This study also discovered that intercultural communication practice is related with intercultural sensitivity.In fact,the intercultural sensitivity of multinational employees mainly comes from their intercultural communication practice;whereas the intercultural sensitivity of English major students mainly comes from their foreign language learning.Both China and Thailand are collectivistic countries with a lot of cultural and traditional similarities.However,the overall results of this study confirm that cultural groups with the same or similar value orientation may differ significantly from each other in cultural and communication behavior in one way or another,a fact that classic cultural theories do not attempt to explain.It is the limit of this study that English proficiency was not conceptualized and operationalized for a comparison across subjects.