In this modern landscape where families are spending increasing time living separately, due to parental separation, work travel, and illness, current communication technologies do not fully support the needs of intimate family communication in families with young children, aged two to nine. Prolonged separation, without intimate communication, can damage parent and child relationships, impacting on intimacy, bonding, and a child’s mental health and wellbeing. Care and play activities are the main methods used to build bonds between parent and child. These are hard to replicate with ubiquitous communication technologies when families are separated. Ubiquitous technology, such as the telephone, is easy to use but does not offer engaging ways for a child to interact. Skype (video call), has a higher potential for engagement due to its multimodal nature (audio and visual), therefore is more emotionally expressive. However, to ‘Skype’ someone, a child requires adult support, as the technology is more complex to use than that of a telephone. Thus, neither the telephone or Skype fully meet family needs for communication. Parental-child separation was looked at within parental separation, work travel and illness, to explain how intimacy can be achieved through technology mediated communication systems. Following a Participatory Action Research methodology, utilising methods such as co-design, co-creation, and participatory design, the research discusses five small-scale studies as well as the Trace project, which was the main study of this research. This research addresses communication issues between families through textile-based communication systems which enable intimacy and bonding. It highlights the importance of intimate communications and offers a list of preferred modes of communication for scattered families (multimodal disparate objects that allow for synchronous or asynchronous communications with either the same modes or different modes of input and output). It also outlines key methods for designing new technologies suitable for use in family research (inclusive methods such as co-design, co-creation and participatory design). A better understanding of the participant families’ emotional needs was achieved, by allowing them to become active participants at every stage of the design process (planning, acting, observing, and reflecting), thus producing considerate technologies for remote family communications.

abstract: The transition out of high school is a major milestone for adolescents as they earn greater autonomy and responsibilities. An estimated 69.2% of adolescents enroll in higher education immediately following high school completion, including increasing numbers of Latino adolescents (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). Integrative model (García Coll et al., 1996) suggests a need for research on promotive and protective contextual factors for ethnic minority children and adolescents. Guided by the model, the proposed research will explore a salient Latino cultural value, familism, and family communication as predictors of changes in depressive symptoms from high school to university among Latino adolescents (N = 209; 35.6% male; Mage=17.59, SD=.53). Furthermore, sleep, a key bioregulatory mechanism, was explored as a potential moderator of these processes (Dahl & El-Sheikh, 2007). On average, familism values were not associated with college depressive symptoms, but family communication was significantly negatively associated with college depressive symptoms. Neither sleep duration nor sleep problems significantly moderated the association between familism values and college depressive symptom. Patterns were similar for family communication. The interaction between sleep problems and familism-support values were significantly associated with college depressive symptoms. However, when simple slopes were probed, none were significant. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2019

Children placed in foster care are the most at-risk youth group in the U.S., often experiencing negative events and outcomes before, during, and after foster care. Despite the availability of statistical data centered on (former) foster children, little is known about how these individuals make sense of their often negative and rupture-laden experiences. One way that individuals make sense of rupture in life is through narratives. Narratives are important to examine because they allow for better understanding of the experience(s) and what experiences mean to those who have lived through them. Specifically, narratives might also illuminate differences in (former) foster children's emergence from foster care as resilient, or with wellbeing intact. Thus, this study aimed to explore adult, former foster children's narrative sensemaking and whether types of stories told correlate with narrator participants' (self-reported) resilience scores. Using mixed methods, I employed narrative thematic analysis to qualitatively analyze narrative interviews, looking at how participants made sense of rupture experiences. Independent coders conducted a content analysis, coding each story as one of the four emergent types, to allow for quantitative comparisons. A Kruskal-Wallis test revealed that resilience scores differed significantly among story types. Follow-up tests determined that narrators of Thriving after Rupture, in which narrators achieved personally because of foster care-related experiences, and Transformation for Self and Others, in which narrators both achieved personally and assisted others because of past rupture experiences, displayed significantly higher resilience than did narrators of Ongoing Rupture, which framed narrators as stuck in rupture and sensemaking cycles. Narrators of Helping Others and Giving Back, who talked about assisting others in the foster care system because of their own experiences, also trended toward displaying greater resilience than Ongoing Rupture. These results indicate that framing might be as important to wellbeing as lived experiences. Thus, it is important to continue to explore narrative therapy as a means to bolster (former) foster children's resilience.

Gay identity is inextricably tied to the metaphor of the closet. This tie is best exemplified by the act of "coming out of the closet," an act when a person discloses a gay identity to another, an act of self-identification and confession that others can motivate but never force, an act typically thought of as necessary, dangerous, and consequential, and an act often viewed as a discrete, linear process. Gay identity is also frequently framed as a self-contained trait thus making coming out a one-sided, personal affair. In this project, I use autoethnography and narrative inquiry, life story interviews of four gay men, life writings by gay men, mass mediated accounts of the closet, and my personal experience to describe three epiphanies-interactional moments that significantly change the trajectory of a person's life-of gay identity: (1) "Learning the Closet," a moment when a person first becomes familiar with the metaphorical space; (2) "Living the Closet," a moment when a person privately acknowledges a gay identity but publicly discounts this identity by saying and acting as if it does not exist; and (3) "Leaving the Closet," a moment when a person discloses gay identity to others. I conclude by describing the "double-bind of gay identity"-the dilemma that forms when a person cannot escape the closet-and argue that once a person identifies as gay, the closet becomes a formative influence on her/his life; a gay person can never live outside of the metaphorical space again, can never live as an out gay person everywhere. I also use a relational perspective to understand how gay identity and the disclosure of this identity implicate others in a gay person's social network. A relational perspective removes gay identity it from the individualistic realm and situates it among beings-in-interaction. In so doing, the experience of the closet becomes removed from the exclusive burden of the self-contained gay person to one in which coming out becomes a shared responsibility by all individuals involved in a relationship.

The majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents. The fact that many of these children use sign language as their primary form of communication poses a unique language barrier between them and their hearing families. In addition, for children who are born into Hispanic families, these children have limited access to Hispanic and Deaf cultures unless their families actively pursue involvement with those communities. Data were collected through ethnographic interviews and limited participant observation and analyzed by means of grounded theory methodology. The study investigated how Hispanic mothers communicate with their deaf children who use ASL as their primary language, as well as how these mothers view Deafness as a culture.

South Africa retains the highest HIV prevalence in the world, with the incidence of infection growing fastest among youth. The purpose of this investigation was to inform preventive family-based interventions designed to reduce youth HIV risks. In 2009, 38 black South African caregivers and youth (ages 10-14) participated in key informant interviews and focus groups, which were coded for themes related to family communication about sex. Findings highlighted a cultural taboo against communication that among some caregivers was shifting. Informed by this qualitative data, in 2010, 97 black South African caregivers and 97 youth (ages 10-14) completed measures designed for quantitative comparisons between the caregiver and youth generations. Results were that youth reported significantly more communication about sex topics than did their caregivers, and significantly lower perceptions of caregiver responsiveness to communication than their caregiver’s self-report. Importantly, although youth reported that they would prefer to ask their mother first a question about sex, currently few do so. Male youth and their caregivers were significantly less likely to report communication about sex topics than were female youth and their caregivers. Correlations indicated that youth-reported perceptions of their caregivers’ responsiveness are likely one of the best indicators of whether and how communication occurs, and that being a younger caregiver is associated with higher self-reported caregiver responsiveness. Regarding safety, nearly twice as many caregivers reported feeling that their neighborhood was “not safe” than did youth and the majority of caregivers reported talking to their youth about sexual violence.

The American Cancer Society estimates nearly 1.5 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer this year. Existing on cancer and its effects on family communication indicate there are few things that have the potential to shake a family to its core like a serious illness (Anderson & Geist Martin, 2003; Gotcher, 1993; Northouse, 2005; Sherman & Simonton, 2001). Communication is one of the most important elements in determining and influencing families' emotions, patients' quality of life, patient care, family relationships and caregiver stress (Beach, 2001). The mother-daughter dyad represents one of the most significant relationships to analyze with respect to the impact cancer has within the family since mothers are typically the primary role models for their daughters (Miller, 1995). Using interviews with mother/daughter dyads, this study seeks to examine changes in communication between mothers and daughters following the mother's cancer diagnosis. The mother-daughter dyad is of most interest in this study for several reasons, most notably that this relationship is the “first dyadic relationship a female child has” (Bishop, 1992, p. 58); additionally, mothers are typically the primary role models for their daughters (Miller, 1995). This study aims to shed light on the relational changes that occur following a cancer diagnosis.

Although research has shown that mental-health stigma can impact an individual’s well-being, little is known about who perpetrates suicide stigma. Moreover, anticipation of stigma could impact whether individuals disclose their suicidal experiences; yet, little is known about suicide disclosure and how family members’ reactions play a role in subsequent mental health. To address these gaps, three studies were designed to examine how stigma, suicide disclosure, and family reaction impact subsequent mental health of attempt survivors and those who have experience suicidal ideation. Individuals who had previously experienced suicidal ideation or a previous suicide attempt (n = 156) were recruited through the American Association of Suicidology. Results indicated that attempt survivors were more likely to experience stigma from non-mental health providers and social network members than from mental health providers. A hierarchical standard regression model including both source and type of stigma accounted for more variance (ΔR2 = .08) in depression symptomology than a model with only type of stigma. Results from respondents who had experienced a nonfatal suicide attempt in the past 10 years (n = 74) indicated that family reaction mediated the relationship between suicide disclosure and depression symptoms (B = -4.83, 95% BCa CI [-11.67, -1.33]). Higher rates of disclosure statistically predicted more positive family reactions (B = 4.81, p = .013) and more positive family reactions statistically predicted less severe depression symptoms (B = -1.00, p = .002). Interpretive phenomenological techniques were used to analyze follow-up interviews (n = 40) with attempt survivors. Individuals’ reactions to suicide disclosure offered insight for attempt survivors’ regarding their place in society. More specifically, reactions impacted the degrees to which attempt survivors felt that they belonged within their social group and whether they were a burden to their loved ones. Given these results, the potential contributions of family scientists to the field of suicidology are examined. Specifically, researchers have primarily examined suicide as an individual phenomenon; family scientists are ideally suited for examining the family’s role after an attempt occurs. However, family science must also make the transition to viewing suicide as a family experience.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1974.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1974.