Communication Barriers among Students of the University of Jordan from Their Point of View

Abstract

This study aimed at identifying the barriers of communication among the students of The University of Jordan from their own perspectives and finding out the relationship between the students’ qualitative traits and communication barriers and the ways to reduce those barriers. A questionnaire was distributed to a stratified random sample which consisted of (504) students from The University of Jordan. The study arrived at the following conclusions: The level of communication barriers among The University of Jordan students with regard to the six criteria was below the average. It showed that the sender occupied the highest rank of these criterias, and then the rest of the barriers were confined to communication situation and response consecutively and of the barriers existed in the communication circle: "sender, message, channels , receiver, response and the communication situation". It revealed that the linguistic barriers comprised the overload, and threatening message, quick and slow response, aggressive message and ambiguity in a message. The physical barriers also included disability in both sender and receiver. The personal psychological barriers include the sender’s carelessness with regard to his appearance, the difference of the education level between the sender and receiver, the receiver’s rash evaluation of the sender, the receiver’s sense of superiority over the sender, negative feedback, and the gender difference between the sender and the receiver. The social barriers encompass religious differences, nationality, the different social status to which the sender and receiver belong, the presence of university violence, the variety in students’ academic achievement, and students’ economical levels. Regulatory barriers, moreover, included the censorship of message’s content, reporting many messages simultaneously, and the state in which the students become a subject to university penalties. With regard to the physical environmental barriers, one might think in not choosing the appropriate place for delivering the message, the difficulty of utilizing the communication channel with regard to its lack of variation, high cost, weak influence on the receiver, the lack of its desirability, and low level of public hygiene. There are statistically significant differences at the level of (a≤0.05) regarding some dimensions and there are no statistically significant differences with regard to the other dimensions. The researcher attributed this to different variables such as gender, faculty and academic level. The researcher also raised many recommendations to reduce the barriers under scrutiny.