Schema-Based Analysis of Gendered Self-Disclosure in Persian: Writing for Dating Context

This paper reports a textual analysis of letters written by 21 male and 21 female participants in Persian. Each writer wrote two letters, one to a dating service and another one to a hypothetical person chosen and introduced by the center. Therefore, a total of 84 letters were collected from the participants. Schema theory was used to find the possible gendered differences between male and female self-disclosure letters. The results of this study confirmed that men and women used significantly different semantic, syntactic and parasyntactic schemata (X2 = 30.37, df = 2, p <.0001), they also wrote differently in terms of the type of schemata forming the genera of the domains. Further descriptive analysis indicated that semantic domain accounted for 74.44% of all schema types used in male letters and 78.98% of the schemata used in female letters.