Engaging Theories in Family Communication

Multiple Perspectives

Dawn O. Braithwaite, Elizabeth A. Suter, Kory Floyd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351790673
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Engaging Theories in Family Communication, Second Edition delves deeply into the key theories in family communication, focusing on theories originating both within the communication discipline and in allied disciplines. Contributors write in their specific areas of expertise, resulting in an exceptional resource for scholars and students alike, who seek to understand theories spanning myriad topics, perspectives, and approaches.

Designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying family communication, this text is also relevant for scholars and students of personal relationships, interpersonal communication, and family studies. This second edition includes 16 new theories and an updated study of the state of family communication. Each chapter follows a common pattern for easy comparison between theories.

1
Introduction

The Landscape of Meta-Theory and Theory in Family Communication Research

Dawn O. Braithwaite, Elizabeth A. Suter, and Kory Floyd

We cannot look at the news, read social media, or talk with people in our lives for very long without the topic of family popping up fairly quickly. When the topic of family does emerge, it does not take long to realize that what families are, what we expect from families, and how we believe people should communicate in families are complex, ever-changing, and often contested (Floyd, Mikkelson, & Judd, 2006). Our goal for this second edition of Engaging Theories in Family Communication: Multiple Perspectives is to provide a resource for researchers, students, and those working with families who want to understand the central role of communication in the lives of family members. Rather than offer readers a summary of research findings by context or topic, as one would find in a handbook (e.g., Vangelisti, 2013), we provide an overview and concise discussion of important theories that can guide the study of family communication. We understand that theories can seem abstract, yet we see them as very practical and useful tools for understanding and addressing the challenges contemporary families face. Regarding theories as tools, we designed this book as a toolbox to help you understand and study family communication from a variety of perspectives and approaches. In this chapter, we provide a map of the landscape of family communication research and theory by presenting an overview of family communication research from 2004–2015 and offering implications for the future of family communication research.

Roots of Family Communication

Although families have been a central part of human history and investigated across many disciplines, the study of family in the communication discipline is relatively young. In fact, most of the senior authors in this book have been instrumental in getting the field of family communication started and moving ahead over the last 30 years. To gain an understanding and appreciation for the state of family communication theory, we: (a) describe the roots of the family communication field, (b) explain how we are defining family communication, (c) present the results of a study that outlines the theoretical and meta-theoretical commitments of family communication research, and (d) describe our process of choosing the theories included in the book.

One thing we can say about the study of communication is that it has always been based on practical goals and concerns. With roots in ancient Greece and Rome, and likely starting earlier in Africa and China, the study of communication started by helping people design effective arguments and speeches (Ehninger, 1968). As the twentieth century began, college courses in rhetoric, public speaking, and performance of literature were found most often in English or theater departments under the title of “speech.” In 1914, a group of speech professors broke off from English and formed their own professional association, which grew into the present-day National Communication Association (Cohen, 1994). Over the first half of the twentieth century, as speech departments were created in universities, they included faculty members who took two very different approaches to the study of communication. Those favoring the Cornell School studied communication from a humanities (rhetoric) perspective. Coming along later, those favoring the Midwestern School studied communication as a science (Pearce & Foss, 1990).

One can see evidence of the practical goal of understanding and improving the human condition throughout the study of communication. After World War II, scholars were focusing on a variety of topics to address challenges and atrocities coming out of that time, including small group discussion as a way of promoting democracy, media and transmission of information, debate, and persuasion. What these early scholars had in common was that they focused largely on message transmission and the clarity and effectiveness of messages. In the 1950s and 1960s, some scholars who took a social scientific approach to their research began to move into speech departments from psychology, sociology, and political science, bringing with them quantitative and experimental research methods (to explore the development of the communication discipline, see Cohen, 1994; Gehrke & Keith, 2015; Pearce & Foss, 1990).

Important cultural developments in the 1960s and 1970s influenced U.S. universities, brought on by social changes such as civil rights, the women’s movement, and growth of the counterculture, along with important transformations in personal and family relationships. Research and classes in interpersonal communication boomed at this time, and these social scientists joined the rhetoricians in departments of speech that later changed their names to “communication” to reflect the breadth of the discipline and what we studied and taught (to explore the development of the interpersonal communication field, see Braithwaite, 2014; Knapp & Daly, 2011).

Studying families has long been a part of a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, education, political science, counseling, gerontology, and human sciences/family studies. Similarly, social science scholars in the communication discipline showed interest in families; for example, some interpersonal communication scholars studied marital couples or parents and children, some media scholars studied the effects of television on children, and some organizational communication scholars studied work-life barriers for women. In their essay, Galvin and Braithwaite (2014) traced the study of family communication as an offshoot of interpersonal communication and interest in therapy and well-being in family systems (e.g., Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967; for a fuller discussion of the development of family communication, see Galvin & Braithwaite, 2014).

Kathleen Galvin and Bernard Brommel published the first family communication textbook, Family Communication: Cohesion and Change, in 1982, drawing on literature from psychology, sociology, and counseling. Around the same time, interpersonal communication scholars were starting to develop research and theory centered on family interaction patterns (e.g., Rogers & Farce, 1975), marital types (e.g., Fitzpatrick, 1987), and conflict and decision-making (e.g., Sillars & Kalbfleisch, 1988). Starting in the mid-1980s, family communication classes started cropping up on college campuses and research programs were growing. Family communication became a full division in the National Communication Association in 1989. One of the most significant developments to move the new field forward was the launch of the Journal of Family Communication by inaugural editor Thomas Socha in 2001.

By the time Dawn O. Braithwaite and Leslie Baxter published the first edition of the present book in 2006, they were able to identify 20 theories to include in the book, about half of them originating in the communication discipline and the other half in allied disciplines. Also at the beginning of the twenty-first century, family communication scholars began to branch out and study diverse family forms, such as inter-ethnic, LGBTQ, single-parent, adoptive, and stepfamilies (see Braithwaite & Schrodt, 2013; Floyd & Morman, 2014; Soliz, Thorson, & Rittenour, 2009; Suter, 2014a, 2014b). Since the first edition of this book was published, we have seen an increase in the breadth of theories, studies using qualitative/interpretive methods, and in engaging a critical lens on family interaction. As a touchstone, the original family communication text is now in its ninth edition (Galvin, Braithwaite, & Bylund, 2015), joined by other texts over the years (e.g., Segrin & Flora, 2011; Turner & West, 2006). There have been many significant advances in family communication, and in many ways, we believe the field is just hitting its stride.

Defining Family Communication

Before we delve further into family communication theory, we should clarify how we are defining our terms. Family communication scholars focus largely on communication as a symbolic process humans use to create meaning. Stewart (1999) so eloquently described this view of communication:

Communication is the way humans build our reality. Human worlds are not made up of objects but of people’s responses to objects, or their meanings. And these meanings are negotiated in communication. Try not to think of communication as simply a way to share ideas, because it’s much more than that. It’s the process humans use to define reality itself.

(p. 25)

Thinking about family communication in this way, communication is much more than transmitting a message from one to others. Family communication focuses on the way we co-create and negotiate meanings, identity, and relationships in social interaction; that is, how we constitute ourselves and our family relationships (Baxter, 2014). From a family communication perspective, we view communication not just as one aspect of a family, but as the central process by which families are literally talked into being, that is, how families are co-constructed, negotiated, and legitimated in discourse. Galvin (2006) coined the phrase “discourse dependence” to help us understand how families define and legitimate themselves within the family and outside the family in the extended family network, with friends, neighbors, and in public discourse. Galvin (2006) thought about discourse dependence as most relevant to non-normative families because they are challenged to negotiate roles and expectations that other families might take for granted. For example, members of a new stepfamily will need to interact and figure out the expectations for relationships in their new household, how to (and how not to) behave, even what to call one another, discovering much of this through trial and error. In this way, members of the stepfamily become especially aware of discourse dependence as they interact to negotiate what it means to be a member of and live in this new family.

However, as we think about it, all families are discourse dependent. You have likely been most aware of this fact at times of family transition. For example, when college students come home after their first year at school, all members of the family likely find themselves needing to interact and negotiate relationship changes from curfews, to independence and privacy, to who is responsible for household tasks. At these transition points, especially, our awareness of communication as constituted in communication practices is probably the most evident to us, but we are always negotiating family in interaction. Although all families are dependent on discourse to some extent, the extent to which families rely on discourse varies. Envision the concept of family as a stool upheld by three legs: biology, law, and discourse (Galvin, 2014). Family forms missing both the biology and law stool legs (e.g., voluntary kin; Braithwaite & DiVerniero, 2014) find themselves perched on the one remaining stool leg and are, thus, the most dependent upon discourse to define relations between members and to present the unit as a legitimate family to outsiders.

For family communication scholars, practitioners, and for family members themselves, conceptualizing families as co-constructed in communication focuses our attention on what it means to be a family and who is family to us. Whereas families may be formed by biological and/or legal ties, they can also be formed by communicatively negotiated bonds of affection, interdependence, history, and long-term commitment. From this perspective, we share Galvin, Braithwaite, and Bylund’s (2015) definition of family as “Networks of people who share their lives over long periods of time bound by marriage, blood, or commitment, legal or otherwise, who consider themselves as family and who share a significant history and anticipated future functioning as a family” (p. 8).

This definition highlights the central role of communication in forming and maintaining families.

Meta-Theoretical Discourses of Family Communication

As this is a book dedicated to family communication theory, we should start by asking, what is the work theories do? At its most general level, a communication theory is a set of statements that renders intelligible some communication phenomenon or process (Baxter & Babbie, 2004). What is important to understand is that what counts as a theory, what a theory is supposed to do, and how to evaluate a theory are embedded in broader philosophical systems of inquiry, or meta-theoretical discourses, about reality and how one produces knowledge claims. In order to understand the concept of theory, then, we believe it is important to provide, however briefly, a back drop of the primary philosophical perspectives that circulate in the family communication literature. These meta-theoretical backdrops are not unique to the family communication domain and they give us a way to organize and think about the ways scholars have approached research and theory.

For our purposes, a discourse is a linguistic system of distinctions and the values enacted in those distinctions (Deetz, 2001). These discourses are points of view that help us to understand and appreciate the different approaches to asking questions about family communication, to choose research methods to answer our questions, and to provide the criteria by which to evaluate research findings and conclusions (Baxter & Babbie, 2004). Each discourse (paradigm) or perspective brings with it a different set of assumptions about the nature of truth and reality, the relationship between the researcher and the phenomenon under investigation, the role of values in theory and research, and how best to write up and communicate the findings of research. It is not helpful to argue about which discourse is correct or superior; rather, the issue is to understand and appreciate the intellectual resources embedded in a given meta-theoretical discourse—the stock arguments if you will, often implicit, that provide warrants for certain research question and research methods to guide a given study. There are a number of excellent frameworks of different meta-theoretical discourses, many providing a greater degree of nuance (see Deetz, 2001; Droser, 2017). However, for our purposes in this volume, we will continue to use three basic meta-theoretical discourses to organize our thinking about family communication research and theory first identified by Bochner (1985): post-positivist, interpretive, and critical, as this provides the most widespread understanding of the broad paradigmatic categories.

Researchers adopting a post-positivist perspective take a scientific approach to research, sometimes called the “logical-empirical tradition.” The goal of scholars in this research tradition is to produce generalizable, cause-effect explanations about how variables are interdependent in an objective world. Researchers seek causal explanations of the social world via webs of variables, some of which function as independent variables in causing outcomes or effects on other variables known as dependent variables. Researchers committed to the discourse of post-positivism will identify a theory and testable hypotheses relevant to the phenomenon they wish to explain and predict. Theories in this paradigm consist of law-like statements that apply across situations, concerning how variables relate, causally or functionally. In its idealized form, the researcher’s task is to deduce testable hypotheses from the theory.

Researchers situating their work in the post-positivist paradigm might be interested in studying how the communication norms of one’s family of origin affect the development of communication norms in one’s own family in adult life. In this tradition, research begins with a theory, such as a theory of intergenerational family transmission, in which predictable patterns among key variables are posited. From this theory, the researcher would derive testable hypotheses relevant to the transmission of communication norms. The researcher would determine whether the hypotheses were supported by the observations, and thus whether the theory of intergenerational family transmission gained support. For the post-positivist, a good theory is one that is accurate (in agreement with observations), testable (capable of being both verified and falsified), logically consistent, parsimonious (appropriately simple), appropriate in scope, and useful for generating predictions and explanations about family communication.

Researchers adopting an interpretive perspective are committed to a rich and detailed understanding of how particular social practices are negotiated and maintained in family communication. Interpretive researchers value the “actor’s point of view”—the perspectives and language choices of the persons being studied. Theories valued by interpretive researchers are focused on meanings and meaning-making, and look for common patterns of meaning among members of a particular group or context being studied. These researchers seek to understand how realit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributor Biographies
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Landscape of Meta-Theory and Theory in Family Communication Research
• 2 Affection Exchange Theory: A Bio-Evolutionary Look at Affectionate Communication
• 3 Appraisal Theories of Emotion: How Families Understand and Communicate Their Feelings
• 4 Attachment Theory in Families: The Role of Communication
• 5 Attribution Theory: Who’s at Fault in Families?
• 6 Communicated Narrative Sense-Making Theory: Linking Storytelling and Well-Being
• 7 Communication Accommodation Theory and Communication Theory of Identity: Theories of Communication and Identity
• 8 Communication Privacy Management Theory: Understanding Families
• 9 Communication Theory of Resilience: Enacting Adaptive-Transformative Processes When Families Experience Loss and Disruption
• 10 Critical Feminist Family Communication Theory: Gender, Power, and Praxis
• 11 Dyadic Power Theory: Dominance and Power in Family Communication
• 12 Facework Theory: Performing Familial Roles in Everyday Interactions
• 13 Family Communication Patterns Theory: A Grand Theory of Family Communication
• 14 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: A Framework for Understanding Family Conflict
• 15 General Systems Theory: A Compelling View of Family Life
• 16 Intersectionality: (Re)Considering Family Communication from Within the Margins
• 17 Language Convergence/Meaning Divergence Theory: Creating Conflict Through Misunderstandings
• 18 Multiple Goals Theories: Motivations for Family Interactions and Relationships
• 19 Narrative Performance Theory: Making Stories, Doing Family
• 20 Necessary Convergence Communication Theory: Submission and Power in Family Communication
• 21 Negotiated Morality Theory: How Family Communication Shapes Our Values
• 22 Relational Dialectics Theory: Realizing the Dialogic Potential of Family Communication
• 23 Relational Turbulence Theory: Understanding Family Communication During Times of Change
• 24 Social Construction Theory: Communication Co-Creating Families
• 25 Social Exchange Theory: A Cost-Benefit Approach to Relationships
• 26 Social Learning Theory: An Emphasis on Modeling in Parent-Child Relationships
• 27 Structuration Theory: Applications for Family Communication
• 28 The Theory of Natural Selection: An Evolutionary Approach to Family Communication
• 29 Theory of Resilience and Relational Load (TRRL): Understanding Families as Systems of Stress and Calibration
• 30 Uses and Gratifications Theory: Considering Media Use in the Context of Family Communication
• Index