Questionnaires

I think that the questionnaires were an interesting way to provoke useful discussions about different topics. Through word association and sentence completion you can see what people from different cultures think about the world, people, politics and other contemporary issues. In some cases there are clear differences but sometimes we seem to have a lot of things in common. The first example I can think of regards the answers about "people from the south". Many of us said that they are cheerful and hospitable but there were also negative comment saying that they don't like to work and are more relaxed. Americans in their responses seem to be very worried not to give stereotyped definitions but in many cases their answers coincide with Italians'. Another field in which we seem to have pretty much the same ideas is politics. Negative words strongly prevail over positive ones.

It is also interesting to see what they think about us and our lifestyle: we appear very similar to their people from the south (relaxed, take it easy), but I think that this image is mainly influenced by the fact that Italians depicted through movies and TV series are people from the south. Personally, I think that Italian people from the north are very different from the stereotyped image Americans have.

I think that through next conversations on skype we will come to know other things about American culture and we will have the possibility to deepen our discussion about stereotypes and false beliefs about each other's culture and way of life.