Group Communication

This entry’s goal is to describe the topics that group communication researchers tend to study, and some pitfalls that they should avoid when studying them. This goal begs the question of what distinguishes a group from an aggregate of people who happen to be doing the same thing at the same time in the same place. The most critical difference is that the members of a group are interdependent in two senses. In one sense, each member’s outcomes from the group experience are as much, if not more, a result of decisions made by others in the group as decisions made by oneself. In the other sense, each member has to coordinate his or her actions with those of other members in order to achieve those outcomes. One action requiring coordination is communication itself, because the very act of communicating in any interpersonal setting, dyadic, or group requires all participants to make their utterances relevant to what others communicated previously.

Two other often-made distinctions are between a group and a dyad, and between a small group and a large group. Starting with the former, the distinction is made because there are processes occurring in groups that are impossible in dyads, such as the formation of coalitions among subgroups and the development of fine gradations in relative power among members. Turning to the latter, any proposed number of members differentiating small from large groups always appears arbitrary. A more principled distinction, proposed by pioneering group theorist and researcher Robert Bales, is that after a small group encounter, each member can report some perception of each other member, if only a memory that they were present. The remainder of this entry examines ways to measure group outcomes, group social influence, and group communication and analyze group data.