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Families of all kinds are faced with increasing information regarding sexual orientation. As lesbians and gay men become more visible as parents, partners, and members of families, it is likely that any given person will know a lesbian, gay, or bisexual family member, co-worker, or friend. Understanding diversity in sexual orientation is not only a task for lesbians and gay men. While maintaining friend, family, and professional relationships, heterosexuals and their families are also becoming more aware of sexual orientation diversity. This research was guided by ecological and narrative perspectives. An ecological view provides a framework for examining families within interacting systems. The narrative approach provides an organization for episodes, actions, and meanings. Families are surrounded by systems that view human behavior through the lens of heterosexual experience. This lens promotes and assigns power to the assumption that people are and should be heterosexual. Five research questions guided the study: (1) What is the content and meaning of family conversations about sexual orientation? (b) How do parents attempt to answer children's questions or inform them about the topic of sexual orientation? (c) How does gender organize family conversations about sexual orientation? (d) What other factors influence parents' attitudes about sexual orientation? (e) What values do parents want their children to have regarding sexual orientation? I conducted conjoint qualitative interviews with 20 heterosexually married parents (10 couples) who reported engaging in conversations with their children (ages 5 to 16) about sexual orientation while promoting a climate of acceptance about sexual orientation diversity. Children wondered mainly about marriage rules and coupleness. Parents reported answering questions honestly and extending conversation when possible. In 7 families, both parents reported that mothers talked to the children more about social topics such as sexual orientation. All parents said their attitudes were most influenced by knowing lesbian or gay people. Despite having heard derogatory statements about gays and lesbians in their families of origin, parents reported changing their attitudes to fit their knowledge of real lesbian or gay people. Parents wanted their children to be "accepting," "respectful," "responsible," "tolerant," "open-minded," and "fair." / Ph. D.

PSRs are one-sided, emotionally-tinged relationships with media characters such as Peter Pan, Batman; Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, and Mulan; and celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Rihanna, and Harry Stiles (Giles, 2000). This project situates children’s PSRs within the family communication environment by exploring the relationships between Family Communication Patterns (FCPs), parental management of PSRs, and perceptions of parent-child bonding. Four parental management of PSRs behaviors, Guiding, Prohibiting, Supporting, and Neutrality, were studied with respect to the Conversation and Conformity orientations of FCPs. Parental management behaviors of Guiding, Prohibiting, and Supporting had significant impacts on perceptions of parent-child bonding, but Neutrality on its own did not have any significant influence. Guiding was manifested through the FCP path of Conformity instead of Conversation. Prohibiting had a strong inverse relationship with perceptions of parent-child bonding. Besides Conformity, Prohibiting also had a significant pathway through Conversation. Supporting had a strong and positive relationship with perceptions of parent-child bonding and a significant pathway through Conversation but not through Conformity. Although Neutrality on its own did not have a significant impact, it had a significant impact through Conformity. Overall, this study fulfills its goal to look at the impact of parental communication behaviors on perceptions of the parent-child relationship. In the context of PSRs, parental communication about managing children’s PSRs is significantly related to the perceptions of parent-child bonding, and the impact of these micro communication behaviors is mediated by the overarching communication environment. Therefore, this study recommends that PSRs can be introduced to the mainstream discussion of interpersonal relationships such that family communication scholarship can explore the role of PSRs beyond media effects.

This dissertation offers an ethnographic account of "the world's largest annual human migration": the family reunion ritual practiced by hundreds of millions of Chinese rural-to-urban migrant workers, who work in cities and travel back to the countryside during the lunar New Year (the Spring Festival) to reunite with family members. The formation and practice of this ritual is situated in the particular historical moment of China's modernization when rural migrants have gained the freedom to leave the countryside but are met with difficulties in settling in the city and becoming urban citizens. Although migrant workers have contributed directly to China's burgeoning economy, without an institutionalized system that provides them security and full social rights, they experience prolonged liminality between the city and the countryside. The Spring Festival reunion offers migrant workers a once-in-a-year chance to achieve family unity, to reconnect with scattered kith and kin, and to temporarily actualize a sense of normalcy and continuity in the rural community. Drawing on theories of cultural communication, ritual, and family communication, I conceptualize the reunion ritual as a form of "lifeworld re-embedment" on China's pathway to individualization--a social process that engages in cultural resources to cope with the risks of modernity, bridging the disjuncture between the individual and the community. Built on interviews with migrant workers and participant observation of family reunions in a village in Central China, this dissertation examines the ritual forms, meanings, and functions of the reunion. I first examine the ritualization of the Spring Festival reunion at a national level, focusing on the spectacular movement of passengers during the Spring Festival travel season. I argue that the Spring Festival homecoming has transformed from a transportation issue to a pilgrimage-like national ritual, projecting an image of the collective pursuit of family cohesion and community integration. As a response to the unequal access to urban citizenship, returning to one's countryside home has also become an alternative way for migrant workers to claim their identities and to find a sense of belonging. In communicating about the family reunion, migrant workers employ culturally distinctive languages of place attachment and collectively used discourses of displacement to construct the meaning of home, separation, and unification. In addition, I explore family rituals performed during the reunion that help migrant workers reconnect with left-behind family members, fulfill family obligations, and create family unity. This study provides a more nuanced understanding of the paradoxical process of individualization in China, in which disembedded individuals have to depend on culturally bound integration provided by the institutions from which the disembedment occurs. In this process, ritual communication not only articulates the tension between the individual and the communal, but also functions as a powerful compensatory solution to the risks of family dislocation. By analyzing the Spring Festival reunion from a micro-level with a focus on how ritualized communication constructs, maintains, repairs, and changes social reality, this study also adds to the body of literature on cultural communication and family communication.

Many scholars contend that family relationships are nonvoluntary despite evidence that suggests family estrangement is both significant and on the rise. Typically, family estrangement is a serious life rupture often brought on by physical, emotional, or psychological abuse. In order to explore this understudied phenomenon, I began by applying a discourse dependence perspective framework to analyze 52 accounts from adult children who voluntarily and intentionally distanced themselves from a parent or parents with whom they had a negative relationship. Specifically, I engaged in thematic analysis to explore the communicative practices adult children enact to accomplish and maintain distance with a parent or parents as well as the practices they use to disclose and sustain their estrangement to members of their social network. Based on in-depth interviews, results suggest that estrangement is a complex process that requires many communicative practices. At a broad level, these practices were categorized as declarative, one-time, and/or continuously enacted. Of note, adult children reported having to spend a considerable amount of time engaging in communicative practices to maintain the distance they were able to create, which suggests that relational maintenance is more than a constellation of practices that keep relationships close. Additional results reveal that the majority of participants did not disclose their estrangement to members of their social work. In the event others knew about the distance, it was typically because they were there to witness the distancing practices or because the participant conditionally disclosed the information. Similar to the emphasis on maintenance, adult children revealed that sustaining the estrangement required extensive communicative work. In other words, adult children had to resist social network members who sought to reconcile them with their parents. Taken together, results from this study hold promising theoretical and practical implications for researchers, clinicians, social network members, and other individuals going through the estrangement process. These implications and directions for research are discussed.

A growing number of families include a member who is transgender or transsexual. A discovery or disclosure of trans-identity and a transition of sex/gender identity that might follow are not only monumental for the trans-identified person, but also for that person's relational partners. When one engages in such a fundamental change of expressed identity, the person's relational partners are faced with renegotiating who that person is as well as who that person is to them, as a relational partner. Often, this process leads to the experience of ambiguous loss in which family members feel grief over a person who is still living. The purpose of this study was to investigate this renegotiation of meaning. More specifically, I sought to discover what cultural discourses or meaning systems are used by family members of trans-people when faced with the task of creating new meanings for their relatives'/partners' identities and their relationships to them, and how those meanings systems might contribute to the experience of ambiguous loss. Using Relational Dialectics Theory and Contrapuntal Analysis, I analyzed the communication of 37 family members and partners of trans-identified persons who had begun or completed a transition of sex/gender identity. I conducted in-depth interviews with each family member, asking them to both narrate their experiences and respond to particular questions. Family members' talk was characterized by four sites of discursive struggle, in which the meanings of four salient concepts were created: the self, sex/gender, trans-identity, and family. The meanings for these concepts were constructed through participants' invocation and positioning of competing discourses relevant to the concepts in question. Results showed that many family members do experience grief in response to a transgender transition and that grief is connected to the meanings they construct at these four sites. The findings show the fundamentality of sex and gender to understandings of personhood, and the centrality of communication to experience.

This dissertation sought to answer four research questions in relation to the master narrative of modern parenthood, themes of untellable tales of parenthood, how parents make sense of their identity in light of possessing untellable tales, and mechanisms parents utilize to cope with and make sense of their untellable tales. What emerges from this dissertation is a much needed, in-depth illustration of the multi-faceted, myriad pressures modern parents face. Furthermore, the results of the data analysis show the lengths parents will go to, to try and live up to the expectations placed upon them in modern society. Finally, this dissertation illuminates the (often) creative ways parents embark upon sense-making and coping strategies to continue to work each day to raise the next generation for future success. Through inductive, open-coding, qualitative analysis the findings related to each research question illustrate many varied, and rich themes. The master narrative of modern parenthood was discovered to contain ten separate narrative threads that weave together to create a rich tapestry of how parents are expected to be responsible for Determining the Future Success of the Child. Five of the narrative threads dictate the roles parents are expected to play within their daily parenting: Provider, Protector, Teacher, Biggest Fan, and Enforcer. Additionally, the master narrative of modern parenthood instructs parents to perform each of the roles in with: Unconditional Love, Selflessness, Attention, Enjoyment, and Perfection. When analyzing parent untellable narratives for emergent themes, it became clear the master narrative was closely entwined with what makes tales of parenthood untellable. The themes that emerged within untellable tales of parenthood were that of: Inadequate Provider, Inadequate Protector, Inadequate Teacher, Inadequate Biggest Fan, and Inadequate Enforcer. Furthermore, tales of parenthood can be deemed untellable because they illustrate a parent performing the various roles of parenthood with the opposite of the master narrative performative expectations. As a result, performative themes of untellable tales were found to be: Selfishness, Frustration, Inattention, Too Good, and Unconditional Love. Possessing untellable tales of parenthood did not disable parents from making sense of their parental identity. Instead, untellable tales were utilized by the parent to explore his or her identity and make sense of who he or she was or wished to be as a parent. This identity exploration manifested within four themes of identity sense-making that emerged during data analysis: Identity Under Construction, Identity Unintelligible to Others, Identity Outlier, and Identity Undecided. Within each of these identity sense-making themes, parents worked to accept/reject their untellable tale of parenthood and understand the stability/fluidity of their parental identity. Finally, when seeking to understand how parents cope with and make sense of their untellable tales of parenthood two large themes emerged: Cognitive Strategies and Communicative Strategies. Within the theme of Cognitive Strategies, parents embarked upon Internal Narrative Reflection and Internal Narrative Reframing to internally work through, assess, and understand their untellable tale of parenthood while not risking outsider judgement, or identity defamation. Communicative Strategies parents utilized for coping and sense-making purposes were found to be: Tell the Untellable, Tell a Therapist, Write the Untellable, and Tell and Alternative Tale. Through these Communicative Strategies parents could reap the benefits of sharing their untellable tale (sometimes creatively) to get listener feedback, emotional validation, and support that then helped the parent cope with and make sense of the challenge presented within the untellable tale and/or the challenges of parenting more generally.

A plethora of studies has worked on family communication and leadership separately. Little research has combined these two components although they both relate to personality characteristics and communication styles. Therefore, this thesis investigated correlations between leadership styles and family communication patterns during childhood. Two hypotheses were proposed representing the relationship between conformity orientation and task leadership, and between conversation orientation and relation leadership. Faculty, non-academic staff, and students in leadership positions from Western Kentucky University were samples of this study. They completed a questionnaire voluntarily. Family communication pattern scale and Leadership Behavior Descriptive Questionnaire were used in the survey. Pearson Product-Moment correlation (one-tail) was used to examine the two hypotheses. The first hypothesis was significantly supported. The results indicated a positive relationship between conversation orientation and relation leadership. Moreover, data showed that most respondents came from conversation-oriented families and used relation leadership styles.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between several aspects of family environment and adolescent substance use. Participants included 372 (M = 15.45 years, range = 15-17) adolescent males with and without a paternal history of Substance Use Disorder (SUD). Participants completed measures of family functioning, family communication, parentadolescent communication, living arrangement, temperament, and substance use. Results indicated that family functioning and communication predicted a significant reduction in the number of drugs used, frequency of drug use, and problems associated with drug use beyond the effects of demographic covariates. Additionally, temperament and family history of SUD were examined as moderators of the associations between family environment and adolescent substance use. Neither temperament nor family history of SUD significantly altered these relationships. The results of this study highlight the importance of elucidating family environment and the role it may play in prevention and interventions efforts for adolescent substance use.

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / O presente estudo pretende suprir parcialmente algumas lacunas nos estudos sobre o desenvolvimento da empatia. A primeira lacuna se refere a incluir os pais, além das mães, na pesquisa, uma vez que aqueles podem ter um papel ainda pouco explorado no desenvolvimento. A segunda se refere a abordar a empatia tanto por uma visão ontogenética como filogenética, pois ambas se complementam na compreensão das nossas capacidades e habilidades, essencialmente muito semelhantes às de nossos ancestrais no ambiente de nossa evolução. Presume-se que no ambiente de adaptação evolutiva (AAE) da nossa espécie as habilidades sociais foram importantes na resolução de conflitos e na manutenção da coesão intragrupais. A empatia, habilidade social foco desta dissertação, é definida como a capacidade de compreender e expressar compreensão sobre os pensamentos e sentimentos de outra pessoa e é uma característica da espécie que sofre desenvolvimento ontogenético, em culturas e nichos específicos de desenvolvimento. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo geral abordar a comunicação empática entre pais e mães e seus filhos pelo olhar da Psicologia Evolucionista do Desenvolvimento. Participaram deste estudo 10 crianças, entre oito e 11 anos e seus respectivos pais e mães, sendo cinco meninos e cinco meninas, todos da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. A empatia dos pais e dos filhos foi avaliada por meio de instrumentos (Inventário de Empatia e Entrevista sobre Cenas de Curta Duração), assim como as crenças parentais sobre a importância e o desenvolvimento das habilidades empáticas, por instrumento desenvolvido para este estudo (Crenças Parentais sobre Habilidades). As famílias participaram ainda de uma sessão de filmagem em três situações específicas de 10 minutos cada: jogo com peças de montar para construção conjunta de escolha livre e a representação de papéis em duas cenas do cotidiano familiar (conversar sobre um boletim da criança com notas vermelhas e sobre um problema que a criança trouxe para os pais). Os resultados foram apresentados e discutidos para cada uma das famílias. Pode-se observar que existem relações entre os escores de empatia dos pais e da criança nos instrumentos utilizados e que, em geral, os pais valorizam habilidades empáticas e atribuem seu desenvolvimento, principalmente ao exemplo e à aprendizagem e não a maturação e características de temperamento da criança. No entanto, nas tarefas propostas, dificuldades de comunicação empática são observadas, levando a que se hipotetize que não é direta a relação entre crenças, habilidades individuais e práticas em família. Reconhecem-se as limitações do presente estudo, de caráter exploratório. Novas investigações com observação da comunicação pais-filhos em situações cotidianas do ambiente natural podem contribuir para o avanço do conhecimento nessa área. / This study aims to partially fill some gaps in the study of empathy development. The first gap refers to the inclusion of fathers, instead of only mothers, in the investigations, since the former may have an unexplored role on child development. The second gap refers to an ontogenetic and phylogenetic approach to empathy, because these levels are complementary on the comprehension of our capacities and abilities, which are essentially very similar to those of our ancestors in our evolutionary environment. It is assumed that in our species‟ environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), social abilities were important in conflict solution and in group cohesion maintenance. Empathy, the social ability which is the focus of this dissertation, is defined as the capacity to comprehend and express this comprehension of others‟ thoughts and feelings and is a species‟ characteristic that can be developed ontogenetically in specific cultures and niches of development. This dissertation‟s main objective is to approach to empathic communication between fathers, mothers and their sons/daughters from the Evolutionary Developmental Psychology point of view. The participants were 10 children, five boys and five girls, from eight to 11 years old, and their respective parents, all of them from the city of Rio de Janeiro. Parents‟ and children‟s empathy were assessed by instruments (an empathy inventory and an interview about short-scenes), as parental beliefs on empathic abilities‟ importance and development by an instrument created for this study (a questionnaire about parental beliefs on abilities). Families have also participated in a recorded session of three specific ten-minutes-activities: a game with building blocks for a free-choice group construction and a role playing of two daily family scenes (to talk about the child‟s school bulletin with red marks and to talk about a problem that the child brought to the parents). Results were presented and discussed for each family. There are parallels between the empathy scores of parents and their children on the instruments used and, in general, parents valorize empathic abilities and they credit its development mainly to their example and to learning and not to maturation and child temperament. However, difficulties of empathic communication were observed in the proposed activities, leading to hypothesizing that the relation between beliefs, individual abilities and family interaction practices is not direct. Limitations of the present study are recognized, as it is an exploratory study. New investigations with observation of parents-children communication in natural environment daily situations can contribute to the progress of knowledge in this field.