Focusing on Eye Contact

This study aims to find the factors that affect eye contact decoding which gives different meanings to different people. This research aims to find out about different elements of eye contact in personal relationships between people like partners, married couples, friends and strangers. Eye contact is the only common language in the world and feature of non-verbal communication which is a branch of interpersonal communication. It is as old as humanity and common in our everyday lives but is hardly researched in communication studies. I set out to shed light on difference in establishing and decoding eye contact with the opposite and the same sex in respect to culture, media and context where it takes places. Qualitative methodology has been chosen and carried out among the students at the Eastern Mediterranean University in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Data were collected from three different levels. The first one is semi-structured interviews. The second method is focus group interviews.The last one is field notes that are based on the notes the researcher on the subject. The results show that eye contact is an important language of interpersonal communication.