Instrument/Web questionnaire

A Persian (Farsi) English speakers’ questionnaire remained on-line between August 2014 and February 2015 and snowball sampling (or RDS: respondent driven sampling) was used. Snowball sampling31 is a form of non-probability sampling (Ness Evans & Rooney, 2013) which takes advantage of the social networks of respondents to offer a researcher with a wider set of potential contacts. The on-line link was sent to all my contacts and asked them to forward it to all their eligible contacts as well. This on-line questionnaire was also advertised through several list- serves, including LinkedIn, Academia.edu, The Linguist List, personal Facebook, and Facebook of the Society for Iranian Linguists.

The questionnaire contained four sections. The first part of the questionnaire, background information, contained open-ended questions about participants’ gender, age, AOA, number of years living in English-speaking countries, the number of languages in which participants can have basic conversations, and country of residence.

The second part, linguistic behaviour, contained 10 closed-ended, 5-point Likert scale items on language choice for expressing anger with different interlocutors (friends, family, colleagues, strangers, yourself), their self-rated knowledge of Persian and English, frequency of use of swearwords in Persian and English, and frequency of use of their first and second

languages. It was clearly indicated in the questions that the researcher was asking participants report on their swearing behaviour with the purpose of emotional expression specifically

expressing anger. In addition, there were ten Persian swearwords which are defined in the Urban dictionary32: “Kesafat”: nasty, morally offensive and indecent ; “Oskol”: useless silly person, also this is recent swearword ; “Bisheour”: stupid and morally cheap; “Bisharaf”: dishounorable ; “Olagh” donkey, usually used as an insult to mean that someone is stupid; “Ashghal”: dirty, garbage; “Dayous”: refers to someone who happily accepts the wrong doing of female members of his family; “Koon goshad”: lazy ass; “Koskesh”: pimp but it can be used to replace fucker;

31 _{“researcher throws the ball in the direction of fresh snow that will adhere and that multiple little pulls and}

pushes are needed to keep it rolling” (Dewaele, 2018c, p. 279).

“Kharkosseh”: somebody whose sister is a whore33. Finally, there were ten English swearwords which are defined as follows in the Oxford dictionary34: “Asshole”: a stupid, irritating, or

contemptible person ; “Fucker”: a contemptible or stupid person (often used as a general term of abuse); “Shit”: worthless person, something worthless; rubbish; nonsense; “Idiot”: a stupid person, a person of low intelligence; “Bitch”: a spiteful or unpleasant woman, a person who is completely subservient to another; “Bastard”:an unpleasant or despicable person; “Jerk”:a contemptibly foolish person; “Suck”:be very bad or unpleasant; “Crap”: something of extremely poor quality, nonsense, rubbish, excrement;“Dick”:a stupid or contemptible man. These were taken from the previous pilot study, and participants were asked questions on each swearword. In order to make it easier for participants answering the on-line questionnaire, I designed the related questions in a format of question forms without having a whole series of large statements, and I used non-standard Likert, standard Likert, and frequency response categories. These questions covered their frequency of use, rate of offensiveness, and effectiveness to express anger.

The third section focuses on acculturation questions. There are eight direct acculturation questions taken from Ryder et al. (2000) with 5-point Likert-scale types ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), which were modified to suit this research project. The word “heritage” was replaced by “Iranian”, and the “white American/American” was also replaced by “current host culture”. The main focus of these questions is on cultural maintenance (heritage culture sub-scale) and participation in the larger society (mainstream culture sub-scale). This research based on a bi-dimensional model of acculturation, which identifies heritage and mainstream culture as independent, unlike the uni-dimensional models which indicate that heritage and mainstream have opposite relations. The heritage and mainstream culture sub-scores means were calculated based on the scoring direction which was taken from Ryder et al. (2000). A score on the heritage sub-scale reflects how much individuals involve themselves in

maintaining the beliefs and behaviours of their cultural heritage. By contrast, a score on the mainstream culture sub-scale reflects how much an individual embraces the beliefs and behaviours of their new culture.

33 _{“Bisharaf”, “Dayous”, “Koon goshad”, “Koskesh”, and “Kharkosseh” are extremely offensive}

swearwords

The last section of the on-line questionnaire is based on the MPQ short form personality questionnaire (van der Zee, et al., 2013). The MPQ basically followed the Big Five themes and structure, but it is designed to make predictions in terms of multicultural adaptation and to measure personality traits that are related to different aspects of intercultural skills, which was a better choice for the purpose of this research than using the Big Five. A study of 257 students showed that the MPQ explains variance above and beyond the Big Five, and the scale covers more aspects related to multicultural success (van Oudenhoven & van der Zee, 2000). A study conducted by Bakker et al. (2006) of 265 Dutch immigrants analysed Dutch immigrants’ attitudes toward four acculturation strategies (assimilation, integration, segregation and

marginalization). Four scenarios were developed and each represented one of the strategies. The results presented the link between high scores on Flexibility and being a full member of the host culture. Those who ranked higher on Flexibility would like to socialize and make friends with members of the host culture. This may help taking into account when there is a selection procedure for “expatriate employees, or training or consulting sessions in preparation for

emigration or an expatriate assignment” (Bakker et al., 2006, p. 2883). In the last section for the MPQ questionnaire, I included first person pronouns at the beginning of each sentence to suit the questionnaire the MPQ short form contained 40 questions with 5-point Likert scale types scale ranging from 1 (totally not applicable) to 5 (completely applicable) and the only difference with MPQ is that MPQ long scale has 91 questions. The MPQ short form consists of the same five sub-scales as the MPQ long scale (van Oudenhoven & van der Zee, 2002) and it is quite reliable as evidenced by high correlation with the original MPQ long scale. The MPQ short form requires less than five minutes to be completed, and it also “has the potential to be widely and efficiently utilized in future research” (van der Zee et al., 2013, p. 123). Moreover, “(the) short version was sufficiently reliable and showed considerable content overlap with the original scale” (van der Zee et al., 2013, p. 123). The scoring directions for calculating the five sub-scales were taken from van der Zee, et al. (2013). These were Cultural Empathy, Flexibility, Social Initiative, Open-mindedness, and Emotional Stability. Those who scored high on Cultural Empathy show an interest in others and understand the feelings and thoughts of others and they have a

sensitivity toward other’s feelings and behaviours. Individuals who score high on this dimension can easily understand the rule of the culture with which they are unfamiliar (van der Zee & van Oudenhoven, 2013). Those with high Flexibility scores can adjust their behaviour whenever it is

required; they switch easily from one strategy to other. They also can switch from their habits to new ones to adapt to the new cultural environment. They are able to tolerate uncertainties and learn from past experiences. They look at the new situation as a positive challenge. People with high Social Initiative scores are inclined to speak out and can take the initiative in social

situations, demonstrate high communication skills, and easily establish interpersonal

relationships. People with nonjudgmental attitudes toward the cultural norms and behaviours of other ethnic groups score high on Open-mindedness. Individuals who score high on these dimensions can “postpone their judgments” (van der Zee & van Oudenhoven, 2013, p. 929). Individuals who stay calm and do not show strong reactions in stressful situations score high on Emotional Stability. Leone, van der Zee, van Oudenhoven, Perugini, and Ercolani (2005) examined the validity of MPQ. They first investigated MPQ cross-cultural generalizability between 421 Italian and 419 Dutch students. The results indicated that the five scales were stable across the two countries. They correlated MPQ scales with the Big Five scales and showed that Open-mindedness was negatively linked to Conscientiousness and significantly related to Extraversion. Social Initiative was positively correlated with Extraversion and Openness to experience, and negatively correlated with Neuroticism. Also, Cultural Empathy was positively related to Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Neuroticism and Agreeableness. Flexibility was positively related to Openness to experience and Extraversion, and negatively linked to

Conscientiousness. Moreover, Emotional Stability was positively correlated to Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness to experience, and Conscientiousness and negatively correlated with Neuroticism (Leone et al., 2005).

The Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient for the acculturation and personality scales used in the present study were calculated. The reliability of the Cronbach alpha scales is consistently high (greater than 0.7), which is acceptable according to Dörnyei (2007): for the measured sub-scores the reliability measures are for “Mainstream culture”, 0.715; “Heritage culture”: 0.740; “Cultural Empathy”: 0.843; “Flexibility”: 0.781; “Open-mindedness”: 0.827; “Emotional Stability”: 0.762; and “Social Initiative”: 0.773.