Search

Fertility problems, or the inability to conceive or carry a pregnancy to term for a period of over 12 months while engaging in unprotected sex, affects 12% of women and 9% of men of childbearing age. To answer calls for more research about individuals' fertility decision-making (DM) with their partners, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 53 individuals who have experienced fertility decision-making with a romantic partner at some point in their lives. Our findings indicate at least three primary ways individuals and their partners navigated their decision-making communication in their infertility "journeys:" (1) the

Objective Provision of compassionate care to infants and their families in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a key component of competent critical care. Although recognized as an essential aspect of NICU care, compassionate care for infants and families in a NICU setting has been underexplored. This study defined and described compassionate care according to NICU staff. Study Design Voice-recorded, face-to-face individual interviews occurred with NICU nurses (n = 45), NICU nurse practitioners (n = 15), and neonatologists (n = 9) from two NICUs in the midwestern United States. Semantic content analysis was used. Consolidated criteria for Reporting Qualitative research guidelines were followed. Results Three dynamic and interactive qualitative themes emerged: excellent standard of intensive care, commitment, and engaged family communication. A conceptual framework entitled patient and family needs-based care was developed from the qualitative interviews. Conclusion The framework developed from this study supports the therapeutic journey of NICU infants and families by integrating a focus on compassionate personalized care within the context of keen clinical and communication skillsets that staff have gained throughout their NICU careers. Key Points

Background: Hospital-based support for bereaved parents is regarded as best practice. Little is known about parental perceptions or programmatic potential of online grief support. Objectives: To learn from bereaved parent participants' experiences with an online support group to include perceptions of technology acceptance and group communication dynamics. Design: Descriptive study reporting on an eight-week online bereavement support group offered during summer 2020. Subjects and Setting: Inclusive of six bereaved parent participants in the Midwestern United States. Measurements: Post-intervention survey consisting of 49-items with the Technology Acceptance Model and Other Communicated Perspective-Taking Ability instruments embedded. Results: Five bereaved mothers and one father (mean age 32 years) residing an average 126 miles from hospital participated in an online support group in a timeframe seven months to one year from the death of their child. Intensity of grief emotion (5/6 parents) and physical distance (4/6 parents) were notable barriers to in-person visits to the hospital, where bereavement support was to be offered. Parents uniformly reported feeling benefit from the program and satisfaction with the program. Respondents self-reported gaining improved communication (4/6 parents), coping (3/6 parents), peer support (3/6 parents), education (3/6 parents), and emotional expression (3/6 parents). Mean scores on the technology acceptance and communication experiences scales were 4.7/5. The virtual format was an acceptable modality with perceived supportive interpersonal communication dynamics. Conclusion: Pediatric palliative care teams may consider the offering of online bereavement support groups. Further research is warranted on the impact and outcomes of online bereavement support groups for bereaved parents.

Background: Parents of seriously ill children are at risk of psychosocial morbidity, which may be mitigated by competent family-centered communication and role-affirming conversations. Parent caregivers describe a guiding desire to do a good job in their parenting role but also depict struggling under the intense weight of parental duty. Objectives and Design: Through this case study, the Communication Theory of Identity (CTI) provides a framework for conceptualizing how palliative care teams can help parents cope with this reality. CTI views communication with care teams as formative in the development and enablement of parental perceptions of their “good parenting” role. Results: Palliative care teams may consider the four frames of identity (personal, enacted, relational, and communal) as meaningful dimensions of the parental pursuit to care well for an ill child. Conclusion: Palliative care teams may consider compassionate communication about parental roles to support the directional virtues of multilayered dynamic parental identity.

Storytelling functions as a means for making sense of and reframing difficulty. The translational storytelling heuristic of communicated narrative sense-making theory proposes that storytelling int...

Grounded in communicated narrative sense-making theory (CNSM), the purpose of the current study was to test the effects of storylisteners’ communicated perspective taking (CPT) on storytellers’ well-being and evaluations of storylisteners’ communication skills in the context of telling stories about difficulty. Pairs of friends ( n = 37) engaged in a storytelling interaction in which one person told a story of a difficult life experience (DLE). Listeners’ CPT was rated by observers using the Communicated Perspective-Taking Rating System (CPTRS) and tellers reported on listeners’ behaviors and their own psychosocial health. Results indicate that observed CPT relates positively to tellers’ perceptions of listeners’ communication competence and CPT, and negatively to listeners’ perceived face threat. Particularly important were the identity validation, agreement, and affective tone dimensions of the CPTRS. The links between observed CPT and communication skills were moderated by the degree to which the DLE was considered upsetting, significant, and based on how often the DLE story had been told. Despite previous research, observed CPT was not related to psychosocial health in the current study.

In this essay, we trace the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of dialogic interpersonal communication that facilitate the link between quality of communication and quality of life...

With cancer increasing in prevalence and high priorities placed on concurrent oncological and palliative care to help meet the familial, spiritual, and individual needs of stakeholders in cancer, research is needed that assesses the factors that facilitate coping across stakeholders in cancer care. We were interested in synthesizing our understanding of communication and relationships among patients, caregivers, and providers based on the reasoning that illness is relational, but often conceptualized and researched from the individual perspectives of various stakeholders. The current study examined the experiences of relational and communication opportunities and challenges during cancer for current and former family caregivers, cancer survivors, and palliative and oncology health care practitioners. The thematic analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews revealed an overarching theme on the benefits of orienting toward cancer as communal, which was, in turn, facilitated or impeded by four additional themes/sets of behaviors: support, presence, perspective-taking, and reframing hope. Results of a cross-case data matrix analysis reveal that stakeholders in different roles experience qualitative differences in their experience of cancer as communal, isolated, or ambivalent. Implications for education, palliative care, and interventions are discussed.

Guided by Communicated Narrative Sense-making Theory (CNSM), the current study investigated mental illness (MI) narratives told within families and the lessons younger members learned from these stories. Individual, semi-structured interviews with young adults (N = 24) revealed that family members, mainly parents, share stories about the MIs of individual family members and narratives reflected themes of struggle and caution. Participants reported learning important lessons from these MI narratives (i.e., MI awareness, importance of understanding MI). Findings illuminate the ways family narratives about MI teach younger members lessons and expectations for managing MI despite sometimes reinforcing MI stigma. Limitations, future directions, and implications for narrative interventions are also discussed.

This study examined adolescents’ (n = 389) perceptions of parent–adolescent communication about sex, including what their parents say about sex, what types of conversations adolescents report as me...

To explain recovery from adverse experiences, researchers have focused on resilience as a process occurring within individuals. This study extends existing research by positioning resilience as an interpersonal process in which people communicatively interpret and respond to adversity. Married participants who experienced significant adversity in their family of origin (n = 193) reported on their familial and marital communication and personal characteristics. Overall, resilience was influenced by the unique and combined influences of individual, marital, and family factors. Individuals’ optimism and efficacy emerged as predictors of resilience, and communicated support from a marital partner was particularly important for those lower in optimism. People from families with a balance of cohesion and flexibility and strong communication were more resilient, regardless of the amount of adversity they experienced. In unbalanced families, supportive marital communication served in a compensatory role t...

Research highlights the importance of perspective taking as a cognitive ability. A growing body of research also suggests that communicated perspective taking (CPT)—or how interactional partners acknowledge, attend to, and confirm each others' perspectives during interactions—enables collaborative sense-making of shared difficulties with significant links to individual and relational health. The purpose of the current study was to further operationalize the construct and to test the relation between CPT and well-being in married couples' (n = 80) conversations about conflict. The Communicated Perspective-Taking Rating System (CPTRS) was developed and tested as a reliable observational system. Findings indicate that husbands' CPT predicted wives' relational satisfaction, and wives' CPT predicted husbands' relational satisfaction. Implications and future applications of the CPTRS are discussed.

This study examined co-mother family of origin stories. Origin stories, representing the formation of a family, are culturally understood within a master narrative of heterosexual love and biological childbearing. Beginnings of co-mother families rupture this dominant, gendered, boy-meets-girl script. Investigating whether or not co-mother stories reify the normative master narrative or if instead their narrations resist and/or possibly transform conventional understandings, analysis identified three co-mother origin story themes: Becoming a Family (1) as Normal, (2) as Negotiation, and (3) as Normalization. Themes differ in terms of depiction of co-mother family formation as congruent with current norms, as something that needs to be made to seem normal (i.e., in need of normalization), or as something between normal and normalization—to be negotiated internally within the couple. Study results are discussed within a broader framework of family coming-together stories.

Scholarship on narratives and social interaction encompasses a broad spectrum of theoretical, paradigmatic, methodological, and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the ways people tell stories in the context of interpersonal communication. The study of narratives and social interaction, at its core, concerns how people construct, make sense of, and negotiate identity, relationships, and meaning. Across approaches, narrative coherence, tone, truth, co-construction, and the functions of telling and listening to stories emerge as constructs central to understanding the communicative construction of narrative meaning. Keywords: family communication; interpersonal communication; narrative; storytelling

This research focuses on how high school adolescents' (n = 159) perceptions of parent–adolescent communication about sex, including communication frequency, parent–child closeness, parents' communication competence and effectiveness, as well as the larger family environment relates to sexual risk-taking and permissive sexual attitudes. Findings show that perceived parental communication competence and effectiveness were the strongest negative predictors of adolescents' permissive sexual attitudes and sexual risk-taking, whereas peer communication frequency was a significant positive predictor. In contrast with previous research, adolescents' perception of parent communication frequency and family communication climate (e.g., conversation orientation and conformity orientation) was unrelated to adolescents' sexual risk.

This study investigated 898 parents’ and adult children’s reasons for estrangement in light of research on interpersonal attributions and the relational consequences of perspective-taking. Three primary categories emerged: estrangement resulted from intrafamily, interfamily, or intrapersonal issues. Within each category, the frequency of parents’ and children’s reasons for estrangement differed significantly from each other. Parents reported that their primary reason for becoming estranged stemmed from their children’s objectionable relationships or sense of entitlement, whereas adult children most frequently attributed their estrangement to their parents’ toxic behavior or feeling unsupported and unaccepted. Parents also reported that they were unsure of the reason for their estrangement significantly more often than did children. Examining estrangement from the perspective of both parents and adult children offers potential avenues for family reconciliation and future communication research.

Framed by relational dialectics theory (Baxter), this investigation considered the meaning(s) of motherhood in female–female co-motherhood. Analysis identified two competing discourses: (1) discourse of essential motherhood (DEM) and (2) discourse of queer motherhood (DQM). Speakers' invocation of the DEM reinscribes the mainstream US cultural discourse that children can have only one authentic (i.e., biological) mother, whereas invocation of the DQM denaturalizes the DEM's presumptions of authentic motherhood as biological, interrupts monomaternalism, destabilizes the patriarch, and troubles the equation of biological with moral motherhood. Whereas interpenetrations of the DEM and DQM were typically sites of adversarial discursive struggle, in a few instances, the DEM and DQM rose above their antagonistic relationship, combining to create new meanings of motherhood.

This study focused on hurtful messages daughters-in-law (DILs, N = 132) reported receiving from mothers-in-law (MILs). Results reveal various hurtful message types: under- and overinvolvement, personal attacks, and hurt communicated to or through a third party. Grounded in attribution theory, we examined DILs’ attributions for MILs’ hurtful messages and their perceived agreement with their husbands’ reasoning for the message. Our findings illuminate distress-maintaining and relationship-enhancing attribution biases for MILs’ behaviors, such that DILs who were less satisfied with their MILs tended to make more internal attributions for MIL hurtful behaviors, and more satisfied DILs tended to make more external attributions. The degree to which a DIL believed she and her husband interpreted his mother’s behavior similarly was also important and positively predicted marital satisfaction. Findings addto the growing portrait of in-law communication, offering directions for hurtful messages and attribution theo...

The overarching goal of the current study was to determine the impact of talking interpersonally over time on emerging adults' individual and relational health. Using an expressive writing study design (see Frattaroli, 2006), we assessed the degree to which psychological health improved over time for college students who told and listened to stories about friends' current difficulties in comparison with tellers in control conditions. We also investigated the effects on tellers' and listeners' perceptions of each other's communication competence, communicated perspective-taking, and the degree to which each threatened the other's face during the interaction over time to better understand the interpersonal communication complexities associated with talking about difficulty over time. After completing prestudy questionnaires, 49 friend pairs engaged in three interpersonal interactions over the course of 1 week wherein one talked about and one listened to a story of difficulty (treatment) or daily events (control). All participants completed a poststudy questionnaire 3 weeks later. Tellers' negative affect decreased over time for participants exposed to the treatment group, although life satisfaction increased and positive affect decreased across time for participants regardless of condition. Perceptions of friends' communication abilities decreased significantly over time for tellers. The current study contributes to the literature on expressive writing and social support by shedding light on the interpersonal implications of talking about difficulty, the often-overlooked effects of disclosure on listeners, and the health effects of talking about problems on college students' health.

Perspective-taking has important connections to social and relational functioning, making it an important skill for marital adjustment (Long & Andrews, 1990). The current study investigated the types of behaviors indicative of communicated perspective-taking from the participant perspective as couples told stories of stressful relational events. Using a stimulated recall procedure, 68 husband and wife pairs jointly told the story of a stressful relational experience and then separately viewed their videotaped interaction and evaluated their spouses' perspective-taking behaviors. Agreement, attentiveness, relevant contributions, coordination, positive tone, and freedom represented the categories of behaviors spouses judged to reflect perspective-taking. In contrast, disagreement, inattentiveness, irrelevant contributions, lack of coordination, negative tone, and constraint all emerged as categories of behaviors lacking in perspective-taking. Findings also indicated that disagreement, attentiveness, inatten...

This study examined how individuals’ satisfaction with their family, as well as the ways they negotiated the telling of a family story, combined to predict their perceived quality of the storytelling interaction. Drawing from family members’ (150 individuals, 50 families) joint telling of an often told family story, multilevel modeling analyses revealed significant variance within and between families’ perceived quality of their storytelling interaction. These variances were explained by family satisfaction and family-level ratings of engagement during storytelling. These findings drive our suggestions for future assessment of multiple members’ perspectives of joint family storytelling interactions.

Although lesbian mothers are often called to justify their family's legitimacy, we know little about these interactions. The current study included 44 female coparents across 10 focus groups discussing the interactive process of discursive legitimacy challenges. Using the theoretical framework of remedial accounts (Schonbach, 1990), inductive and deductive coding revealed several existing and new types of challenges, accounting strategies, and evaluations relevant to interactions of lesbian mothers. Communicative processes unique to the interactions of female coparents included challenges emerging from societal master narratives (e.g., health care, education, politics, religion); accounting strategies such as leading by example; and evaluations related to the ways in which children render the family acceptable. Findings offer strategies for coping with the discursive challenges lesbian mothers encounter.

Adoptees are partially or entirely disconnected from those involved in their birth stories, so adoptive families create adoption entrance narratives to fill that void. Scholars assert that these narratives impact adopted child well-being later in life, but that assumption has yet to be empirically tested. The goal of this study was to examine themes emerging from adoption entrance narratives (n = 105), and to then determine the impact of story content on adoptees' self-concept. Seven themes emerged: openness, deception, chosen child, fate, difference, rescue, and reconnection. Results indicate the salience of the chosen child, negative reconnection, and difference themes significantly predicted differences in adoptees' self-concept.

This study investigates memorable messages that daughters report hearing from their mothers about romantic relationships to examine the development of meaning in the content of parent–child communication and the ways in which these messages may affect and reflect adult daughters’ relational worldviews. Findings from a study involving 149 adult daughters revealed 4 supra-categories of memorable messages: value self, characteristics of a good relationship, warnings, and value the sanctity of love. Moreover, statistical analyses reveal that memorable message types significantly related to daughter's romantic relationship schemata as operationalized by Fitzptarick's (1988) couple types. Both message and couple type predicted intergenerational transmission.

Narrative theorizing suggests that narrating stress, difficulty, or trauma can be beneficial for improved mental health, yet extant research tends to consider narrating stress as an individual or psychological construct. However, in close relationships, people often experience shared stressors and jointly tell their shared stories of difficulty to others. Thus, joint storytelling processes likely also relate to individual health. We tested this expectation using a series of actor-partner interdependence models and path analyses in a study that included 68 couples' video-recorded joint storytelling interactions. Findings primarily indicate relationships between husbands', wives', and couples' storytelling behaviors and husbands' mental health. Generally speaking, however, storytelling behaviors did not predict wives' mental health. Interpretations, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

The current study focused on discovering the ways in which the intergenerational transmission of family legacy stories both enables and constrains individual family members’ sense of their own identities. Using semi-structured interviews, 17 third generation family members identified a multitude of both positive and negative family legacies. Both positive and negative legacies were influenced by the storytelling context. Positive legacies portrayed families as hardworking, caring, and cohesive while negative legacies were more idiosyncratic. Individual family members typically responded to their family legacies by embracing the positive and rejecting the negative. However, individuals’ responses also pointed to additional complexities in accepting or rejecting family legacies. Specifically, some individuals embraced negative family legacies and rejected positive ones; others only accepted portions of the legacies; and some reported their legacies as unembraceable.

Narratives help people make sense of difficult experiences. In addition, stories provide insight into people's conceptualizations of the world, including their understanding of their family relationships. Given these two functions of storytelling, the ways in which family members tell stories about difficult experiences together should reveal or reflect relational qualities. This project focused on how the family relational context relates to jointly-enacted sense-making behaviors as families tell stories of shared difficult experiences. Findings indicate that interactional sense-making behaviors, in particular coherence and perspective-taking, predict important family relational qualities. This suggests that family qualities affect and are reflected in the likelihood that family members will engage in productive sense-making behaviors as a unit when talking about a shared difficult experience.

A seemingly rudimentary, but potentially significant and understudied communicative aspect of stepfamily development involves the choice of terms family members use to address one another. Ganong and Coleman (2004) argued that appropriate names for stepfamily relationships do not exist. Anthropologists and sociolinguists have long maintained, however, that the nature of personal relationships can be revealed through the use and choice of personal address terms (Beidelman, 1963; Emihovich, 1981). Therefore, in the present study we examined the use and meaning of stepfamily address terms in an attempt to understand how stepchildren use them and make sense of relational identities as well as potentially difficult stepfamily transitions. Results of 39 in-depth interviews suggest that the variety of address terms may be grouped according to formal, familiar, and familial terms and suggest stepchildren regularly engage in code-switching depending on their audience. Stepchildren reported using address terms to s...

Relational scholars often focus on relational life cycles, including the ways in which relationships come apart. The idea that relationships end at a particular stage, however, suggests that former partners no longer communicate. The current study extends the relationship life cycle literature by examining nonmarital post-dissolutional romantic relationships (PDRs). Participants (N = 174) completed written questionnaires gathering PDR turning point descriptions and graphs using a modified Retrospective Interview Technique. Turning point graphs revealed four different trajectory types: Linear Process, Relational Decline, Upward Relational Progression, and Turbulent Relational Progression, which were characterized by 10 categories of turning points. Those with linear trajectories reported the least amount of difficulty adjusting, and those with upward relational progress trajectories reported the highest quality PDRs.

Family stories work to construct family identity. Little research, however, has examined storytelling in families. This study examined storytelling content and process to assess the extent to which families jointly integrated or fragmented a shared sense of identity and how these discursive practices relate to family qualities. Results of a study involving 58 family triads indicate relationships between story theme (e.g., accomplishment vs. stress), person referencing practices (e.g., we-ness vs. separateness), and interactional storytelling behaviors (e.g., engagement, turn-taking). Moreover, story framing, perspective-taking, statements about selves-in-the-family, and identifying as a “storytelling family” emerged consistently as positive predictors of family satisfaction and functioning. The results offer a portrait of how families communicate identity and functioning in joint storytelling interactions and further position storytelling as a communication phenomenon worthy of consideration.

The construction of narratives has been shown to assist sufferers of emotional or traumatic events - such as the ending of relationships - in making sense of and coming to terms with the event. Despite this connection, few studies have explored how the completeness of the narratives contributes to positive outcomes. Building on research in both communication and psychology, we conceptualized a complete narrative as one that clearly and extensively (1) segmented the experience episodically/sequentially, (2) represented causes and consequences in the explained events, (3) developed characters relative to the story, (4) evoked and made sense of affect, (5) drew meaning from the events in the narrative, (6) provided a coherent narrative, and (7) attributed responsibility to the characters in the story. We collected and analyzed the break-up stories of 90 participants. We then rated the narratives to see if relationships exist between narrative completeness and adjustment to relationship dissolution as well as to the teller's role in the break-up and his or her current relationship status. In addition to the implementation of a new method for coding and analyzing narrative content, the results indicate that certain elements of completeness are more related to adjustment than are others.