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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 (Schönbach, 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending previous research (e.g., Baxter et al., 2009) by examining adoptive parents' sense-making of laypersons' conceptions of family, and following Owen (1985), we conducted a metaphoric analysis of twelve focus groups—69 parents with adopted children from either Vietnam or China. Adoptive family as battleground emerged as the primary metaphorical frame that adoptive parents use to make sense of laypersons' remarks about their families. A battlefield with lines drawn between dueling ideologies about family comprises this battleground. Demographers' and scholars' plural views oppose laypersons' narrow conceptions of how families “should be.” Parents understood laypersons' remarks as saying (directly or indirectly) that their adoptive families violated the traditional view of family in terms of: racial dissimilarity between members, construction of family via adoption, and adoption of a child born outside the United States. Laypersons' traditional view is both reinforced and constituted by racist, biologically normative, and nationalist beliefs, which, when instantiated in talk (e.g., racist remarks), represent assaults on transracial, international adoptive families. Our results suggest racism, biological normativity, and nationalism remain dominant in U.S. family ideology. As an implication, we suggest changes to pre-adoptive education to help adoptive families discursively cope with their stigmatized social position. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objectives: By the end of this activity, students will not only be able to identify, interpret, and differentiate five relational theories, but also able to design an original model and dramatic performance to teach fellow students about the theories of symbolic interactionism, social exchange, relational dialectics, social penetration, or uncertainty reduction Courses: Relational Communication, Communication Theory, Interpersonal Communication [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research finds that parents in transracial, international adoptive families experience outsider remarks as challenging to family identity. Yet, research also finds that in the face of these identity-disconfirming remarks, parents manage to produce identity-affirming responses. In the current study, we extend these findings by examining the decision-making criteria underlying parental responses and by ascertaining how these criteria change across time. Framed by the concept of discourse dependency, we report on the results from a written survey completed by a volunteer national sample of 245 parents with children adopted from China. Parents were from 38 states, tended to be female (84.1%), White (95.0%), ranging in age from 31 to 65 years. We found that parental decisions about how (and whether) to respond were relationally and interactionally contingent. Decision making criteria changed across time, with experience, and as children developed. Most often, parents made changes to better manage the adopted child's privacy boundaries. Applying Social Constructionism, we discuss our results in terms of the positionality of the family implied by outsider remarks, and the identity-work accomplished via changes to parental responses. We conclude with practical implications for improving family communication and directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that social interactions may challenge the identity of families with adopted children from China. Yet, both the extent of challenge experienced, and how families negotiate these interactions remains unknown. Thus, this project investigates the degree to which questions or comments from others either support or challenge family identity, as well as the degree to which response strategies used by parents either support or challenge family identity. A volunteer national sample of 245 parents with adopted children from China completed a survey with both closed- and open-ended questions. This study found that the majority of comments and questions were experienced as challenging. Simultaneously, language functioned as a resource for parents to respond in ways that validated the family as a construct and the relations between members as familial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how lesbian couples negotiate public-private tensions in their display of relationally significant symbols. Interviews were conducted with 20 lesbian couples. The majority identified rings and homes (85% and 90%, respectively) as symbols that nonverbally communicate their commitment. Relational dialectics frames our explanation of couples' negotiation of the public-private tensions of these symbols. Couples dealt with tensions by choosing to display symbols either privately or publicly. Couples who displayed symbols publicly sometimes upheld and other times challenged heteronormativity. Couples who challenged heteronormativity were required to do more discursive work to call into question heteronormative standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this project is to explore why, given United States women's historical struggle to gain legal and social acceptance of nontraditional naming forms, the overwhelming majority of women continue to follow tradition and adopt their husbands' names upon marriage. To begin to explain this phenomenon, this study focused on Catholic women, who changed their names between 1940 and 1998. This article illustrates the role tradition plays in participants' worldview and how tradition influences their behavior and attitudes toward naming practices. The naming behaviors and attitudes of the women in this study are then analyzed within a larger sociocultural and political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]