“Wow! You Look Stunning!”: A Cross-Cultural Study of Compliment Responses Among Tribal Filipino Youth

Abstract

This qualitative – phenomenological study aimed to
examine the different compliment responses employed by
Mandaya, Manobo, and Bagobo Filipino tertiary students. The
data were collected through in-depth interview and written
discourse completion task (DCT) wherein a total of 30 Filipino
tertiary students participated in this study; 12 underwent indepth
interview while 18 answered the DCT. Using the Miles and
Huberman framework, data revealed that participants opted to
follow the trend from previous researches: accept, reject, and
mitigate patterns. However new schemes were also revealed in
the micro level, such as the intensifying response and reject +
comment. It was also revealed that both Mandaya and Bagobo
participants mostly preferred mitigate strategies. On the
contrary, the Manobo participants used the accept strategy.
Results also showed that all participants preferred opting-out
strategy of the Mitigate macro level. Further studies are
warranted.