How Students’ Gender and Sex Affects Comfort with Instructor Immediacy Behaviors

This is a two-part study that investigated university students’ comfort with instructors’ nonverbal immediacy behaviors in a college classroom. A sample of 289 participants was drawn from a regional university in the Midwest. The participants were asked to respond to an instrument designed to measure the students’ comfort with an instructors’ nonverbal immediacy behaviors. In the first study, the results do not support the hypothesis that males are significantly more comfortable with immediacy behaviors than female students. The results also do not support the hypotheses that students of both sexes will be more comfortable with immediacy behaviors from female instructors than male instructors, or that of the four possible combinations, female students with male instructors will be the least comfortable with immediacy behaviors. In the second study, the results suggest that student gender does not have a significant effect on students’ comfort with instructor immediacy behaviors. Finally, limitations, implications, and suggestions for future research are addressed