COMMUNICATION FACTORS RELATED TO CLOSER INTERNATIONAL TIES: AN EXTENSION OF A MODEL IN BRAZIL

Central to the study of intercultural communication has been the question of what promotes closer ties between nations. This research replicates and extends a model that specifies three factors (perceptions of homophily, shared interests, and threats), drawn from social distance and systems perspectives, that are posited to have an influence on the desire for closer ties between Brazil and the U.S. Each of the factors have previously been identified as occupying central positions in the development of international relationships. This research extends this model by explicitly incorporating a range of communication channels which are impacted by these factors and which are also hypothesized to effect the desire for closer ties. The results were supportive of the model, with excellent goodness of fit measures for the specified model to the observed data. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for conflict management.