RT Journal Article
T1 Online disagreement in WhatsApp groups: A comparative study of Spanish family members and work colleagues
A1 Fernández Amaya, Lucía
K1 Digital communication
K1 Disagreement
K1 Spanish
K1 WhatsApp
AB The purpose of this paper is to compare disagreement in two different WhatsApp groups: one for members of the same family, and another for work colleagues. After the analysis, 427 instances of disagreement were identified in the family group, and 161 in the interactions between work colleagues. The most common strategy in both corpora is ‘Giving opposite opinions’. Nevertheless, the rest of the results present very significant dissimilarities, most notably the higher presence of disagreement in the family WhatsApp group. This higher tolerance for disagreement is corroborated by the choice of linguistic strategies made. Whereas the family members tended to give emotional or personal reasons for disagreement, as well as negative comments on the topic, the colleagues preferred to express their disagreement with mitigating expressions and token agreement. Thus, in the corpora studied, the expression of disagreement seems to be less face threatening for family members than for work colleagues.
PB Sage Journals
YR 2021
FD 2021
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10433/22711
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10433/22711
LA en
NO Fernández-Amaya, L. (2021). Online disagreement in WhatsApp groups: A comparative study of Spanish family members and work colleagues. Discourse & Communication, 15(5), 542-558. https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813211017711
NO Departamento de Filología y Traducción
DS RIO
RD May 30, 2026