DIMENSIONS OF INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION^ Myron Wish

We report some results from a study whose primary aim was to explore the conceptual structures people implicitly use in comparing and de-scribing different kinds of interpersonal communication. The focus of this research is on two variables that are likely to affect the way people communicate and interact with each other-- the relation-ship between them and the particular situational context. The part of the study which is reported here is based on ratings of hypothe-tical communication episodes on numerous bipolar scales. Multidi-mensional scaling analyses of the data revealed five dimensions in-terpreted as "Cooperative and Friendly vs. Competitive and Hostile," "Intense ~ s. Superficial, " "Autocratic vs. Democratic, " "Formal vs. Informal, and "Task Oriented vs. Non-task Oriented. The relative importance of the interpersonal relation and the situational con-text for evaluations of the communication episodes on each dimen-sion are discussed