Tri-generational family conversations: communication accommodation and brokering.

Abstract

Communication between grandparents and grandchildren can be superficial because of insufficient common ground between them. Among Chinese immigrant families in New Zealand, communication is complicated by linguistic mismatches, as grandparents may be proficient only in Chinese and grandchildren in English. To surmount these communication barriers, middle-aged parents (who know the cultures and languages of both grandparents and grandchildren) may play the role of a 'communication broker' to encourage and assist the two generations to conversationally move towards each other. We identified 35 cases (tokens) of brokering in 12 New Zealand Chinese families and found, as hypothesized, that brokering was significantly overrepresented in moderately (compared to high- or low-) acculturated families, and that brokers were mostly middle-aged parents. In the qualitative part of the study, detailed turn-by-turn analyses of brokering were conducted to reveal how brokering was occasioned, its subsequent enactment and eventual outcome. The results extend the understanding of unmediated communication accommodation in dyadic settings to mediated accommodation in group settings wherein a third (and sometimes a fourth) person brokers the accommodation. The resultant framework of brokered accommodation will be useful for research on other group conversations such as those involving a nurse brokering between a doctor and a patient.