Should we speak? Analysis of the discourse and strategies used in WhatsApp by university students

Abstract

This study aims to detect the habits, strategies and linguistic characteristics used in the WhatsApp communication system, as a social network with a greater number of users, by university students of the University of Granada (Spain) with a sample of 342 conversations (198 of women and 144 of men) offered by a total of 114 participants to whom an ad hoc questionnaire designed to complete the information is also applied. The data analysis is done by the statistical program SPSS (version 22 for Windows) and the Morphological Text Parameterizer (ParamText TIP) of Carreras-Riudavets et al. (2011). The study exposes the use made of this communication channel and confirms that a specific multimodal language is used. It also reveals the existence of some differences from a gender perspective.