Toward a Theory of Family Communication

Abstract

Scholars who study the family generally agree that the values, behaviors, and social environments that affect family structures have changed a great deal over the past 2 decades (Fitzpatrick & Vangelisti, 1995). The ability of families to survive these changes suggests that families are flexible and that their flexibility is aided by how family members communicate. Furthermore, although a number of the functions of the family have been delegated to other social agencies, family members are expected to provide caregiving and support and to nurture one another. Whether conceived of as a process of making facts mutually manifest (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) or of developing and sustaining definitions of reality in relationships (Berger & Kellner, 1994), communication plays a central role in the family. Despite this obvious importance of family communication, there are no theories of family communication per se, although there is a growing body of excellent, theoretically driven research on various topics in this arena (Fitzpatrick & Vangelisti, 1995). The purpose of this manuscript is to attempt to fill this lacuna by developing a theory of family communication that builds on the advances made in research involving the schematic representation of relational knowledge in human cognition and that takes the unique family communication environment into consideration. To that end, we first provide some background work, explicating key concepts and terms, and discuss the relevance of intersubjectivity and interactivity for family communication theories. We then explore relational theories that employ relationship schemas and develop a genIn this article, the authors develop a theory of family communication that is based on the schematic representation of relational knowledge. They discuss pertinent issues surrounding family communication and develop a general model of the role of relational schemas for interpersonal communication. Taking the specific environment of family communication into consideration, the authors then develop a theory of family communication based on a family relationship schema and describe the schema’s location in cognition, its content, and its role in family communication.