Renegotiation Of Roles Research Articles

“It Just Shifted Everything in Our Family Dynamic:” Recalibration within the Family System in Response to Alzheimer’s Disease

ABSTRACT Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a debilitating progressive illness that wreaks havoc on the person with Alzheimer’s (PWA) and their family. AD impairs the PWA’s cognitive, communicative, and bodily functioning, and family members are challenged to maintain ongoing but significantly altered relationships with the PWA. We aimed to understand how the actions of family members of a PWA served to recalibrate the family system. Among the changes that recalibrated the family system was the renegotiation of roles in family subsystems that positioned family members as ingroup or outgroup members based on acceptable and legitimate support provision. Family members also began focusing on logistics of care and aimed to create “new normal” ways of interacting with the PWA that were painful but necessary for continued connection. This research has implications for what grief looks like with AD, how family members judge support, and how counselors can best work with family members.

Work from Home: Social Media, Virtual Meeting and the New Family Relationship

The COVID-19 pandemic has actually forced people to work at home. Office activities outside the home can result in the transmission of COVID-19 to its workers. The government has taken a decision to minimize employee attendance at the office. Employees are encouraged to work at home (WFH), especially in groups vulnerable to infection. The house is turned into an “office space.” With the internet network, these employees are connected to each other. Although factually, this pattern is not a new thing because it has been carried out since the 2000s and is now becoming increasingly intensive. Through qualitative research with an ethnomethodological perspective, the results show that with this pattern, the house has become an encounter between public space and domestic space. This requires a strategy to manage roles in the home. Through in-depth observations and interviews, there were several important findings. First, there is a struggle for space in the house. Second, there is a transfer of stress from work to home. Third, there is a renegotiation of roles in the house, so as not to disturb family harmony. No less important, the community of users of social media and virtual meetings builds constructions of public and domestic space and time. The division of space and time in virtual space is also related to a person's role and social status when in the real world of work.

Adult daughter aging mother relationship over the life cycle: The Turkish case

Effects of mothers and daughters life cycle changes on mother–daughter relationships in the present study. The life cycle transitions focused on in this study are daughters' marriage and parenthood and mothers' widowhood and declining health. In-depth interviews were conducted with thirty Turkish adult daughter–aging mother pairs. Analyses of interviews with mothers and daughters revealed that age related changes reported by Turkish mothers and daughters were similar to those reported by western participants. Mother–daughter relationships were transformed when daughters got married, had children, and when mothers became widows. Relationships generally improved over the life cycle. Shared sense of femaleness increased and was reinforced by daughters' experience of wife and mother roles and resulted in greater empathy for mothers. Mothers' widowhood and declining health were associated with role reversal. Certain culture specific themes emerged. These were transfer of the responsibility for the daughter's honor from the family to the husband, stress on filial obligations, view of care giving and care taking as cyclic over the life cycle, explanations of conflicts by external norms and/or circumstances, association of women with places and/or relationships. Ambivalence voiced by daughters was interpreted as renegotiation of roles within a society in transition from traditional to more individualist norms.

Sharing the arena: Changing roles and negotiating power among teacher education participants

This article describes and discusses the changes that took place when a group of university faculty members encouraged the participation of traditionally silent teacher education participants (supervising teachers and teacher education students) in the process of teacher education. The findings of this study include defining the delicate balance between inviting participation, negotiating roles, and sharing power in an arena traditionally reserved for only one group of participants. Participants (including university faculty) are often reluctant to give up the security of their traditional roles; therefore, they have difficulty taking on new roles. Furthermore, there is a continual tug of war between participants because of the constant negotiation and renegotiation of roles, relationships, and power. Traditional ways of interacting on the part of all participants are called into question. Understanding this balance proved to be the foremost difficulty for all participants involved.

Intergenerational Relations and Life-Span Developmental Psychology

Intergenerational relations was the theme of the Ninth West Virginia University Life-Span Developmental Psychology Conference. Invited papers addressed a broad range of methodological, cultural, and thematic issues related to intergenerational relations across the life span. The need for additional intergenerational research and improved sampling procedures, the need to emphasize similarities in intergenerational relations rather than differences, and the resilience and dynamism of intergenerational relations as reflected in the family’s renegotiation of roles in response to various life events were themes that emerged and served to unify the various papers.