Positive Versus Negative Politeness Strategies: Predicting User Engagement in Reddit-Based Academic Discourse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54536/jnll.v4i2.8455Keywords:
Academic Discourse, Negative Politeness, Reddit, User EngagementAbstract
Politeness research in academic discourse has focused mostly on regulated teacher-student interactions, leaving open, institutionally unregulated forums understudied. This study explored the extent to which positive and negative politeness strategies differentially predict user engagement in discussions of university experience on Reddit among Kenyan university students, using Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory framework. A convergent mixed-methods design combined content analysis and discourse analysis on a corpus of 200 posts and comments collected from discussion threads of five academic-related subreddit forums. Content analysis relied on a coding scheme with high internal consistency (Cohen’s κ = .84) to identify politeness strategies. Descriptive statistics and Pearson’s correlation were used to compare engagement (upvotes, replies, thread depth) with the occurrence of positive and negative politeness strategies. Positive politeness was more prevalent than negative politeness (in-group markers constituted 42.1% of positive politeness) and showed a significantly stronger positive correlation with all engagement measures (upvotes r = .412; replies r = .385) than negative politeness (r = .336; r = .351). Positive politeness yielded a higher mean engagement than negative politeness. Discourse analysis showed that strategy choice was topic-dependent: positive politeness strategies dominated supportive posts, while negative politeness occurred in face-threatening topics such as unemployment and academic failure. These results indicate that positive politeness strategies are the most important predictors of engagement in Reddit-based discussions due to their face-saving nature, as opposed to face-debasing negative politeness strategies. The findings extend politeness theory to open peer-based community settings and offer guidelines for discussion facilitators.
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