Students' Self-Disclosure in the College Classroom

This study examined how college students (61 men, 72 women) differed in the breadth and the depth of self-disclosure when interacting with their instructors and their classmates as inferred from responses to the 25-item Self-disclosure Questionnaire of Jourard. For each item, respondents indicated the Breadth (the number of topics) and the Depth (the intimacy of the topic). Students reported a higher Breadth of self-disclosure with their classmates than with their instructors on 9 of the 25 items, but there were no significant differences for Depth of students' self-disclosure. These findings suggest that students are more apt to self-disclose with classmates rather than instructors but the self-disclosure may not be intimate.