Individual and community practices for constructing communicative resilience: exploring the communicative processes of coping with parental alienation

ABSTRACT

Parental alienation occurs after parents divorce and intentionally or even unintentionally persuade their children to distance themselves from or reject the other parent. Framed by the communication theory of resilience, this study explores the communicative practices that enable and constrain the targeted alienated parents’ ability to create normalcy at the individual and online community levels. We also examine the relationships between individual-level and online community-level resilience. Findings from 40 narrative interviews reveal communicative practices/processes that enable and constrain alienated parents at both the individual and online support group levels. Findings also suggest that there is a robust relationship between resilience practices at the individual and community levels. Theoretical implications and practical applications are discussed.     

Flying in a V formation: themes of (in)equity,reality, and togetherness in adult siblings’ narrative explanations of shared parental caregiving

Guided by communicated narrative sense-making, the present study explored the themes that characterize adult siblings’ stories about their experiences with sharing care of aging parents. Interviews with 20 adult siblings revealed the varied and emotional nature of their shared parental caregiving stories. Adult siblings primarily constructed meaning of their caregiving experiences by drawing upon three overarching narratives: (1) the narrative of (in)equity, (2) the narrative of ideal versus real, and (3) the narrative of interconnectedness. These findings highlight the need for adult siblings providing care for their parents to work together as a team, exercise empathy in their interactions, and express gratitude for one another’s contributions. Several practical applications are discussed that can help siblings manage and overcome the relational challenges associated with caring for a parent.     

Establishing the need for health communication research: best practices model for building transdisciplinary collaborations

The benefits of transdisciplinary collaboration for addressing complex health problems are widely accepted; however, acknowledging the bumps and twists along the road that are inherent in those collaborations is often considered taboo. Academic norms that prevent open discussion of these challenges can have counter-productive results. This essay describes the major education efforts, milestones, and footfalls in the development of an effective partnership between communication-trained researchers in a College of Journalism and Communications and medical researchers in a College of Medicine. We hope it can serve as “best practice” for understanding the value of team science and interdisciplinary research collaborations.     

Learning supportive communication through an adaptation of the board game Apples to Apples

People who receive supportive communication when they are distressed benefit from a series of advantageous outcomes. We designed the following activity based on the popular board game Apples to Apples to provide students with an experiential understanding of different types of social support—(1) emotional, (2) esteem, (3) network, (4) informational, (5) tangible, (6) celebratory, (7) social presence, and (8) nonverbal—as well as to illustrate the concepts of support matching and person centeredness.

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Relational Communication, Health Communication.

Objectives: To provide students with an experiential understanding of different types of social support: (1) emotional, (2) esteem, (3) network, (4) informational, (5) tangible, (6) celebratory, (7) social presence, and (8) nonverbal, as well as to illustrate the concepts of support matching and person centeredness.     

“How do I remember when I got my dog?” The structure and development of children’s metamemory

Kreutzer et al.’s (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 40(1):1–60, 1975) metamemory interview has been widely used in children’s metamemory literature, yet the psychometric properties of the measure have yet to be reported, and the format and language of some subtests may pose problems for young children. Researchers often combine subtests with other tests purported to measure metamemory, yet there is little empirical data regarding how these subtests relate. It has been proposed that metamemory is comprised of distinct procedural and declarative components, but this has not been empirically tested in young children. Therefore, the two studies reported here aimed to adapt Kreutzer et al.’s interview to increase its developmental appropriateness, to examine the relationship between the interview subtests, to add subtests that purport to test procedural metamemory, and then to examine the factor structure of the resulting scores and investigate how metamemory changes with age across the elementary school years. The results suggest that the adapted versions of the subtests are generally less contaminated by language ability, especially for the younger children. Factor analysis indicated the presence of two declarative metamemory factors and one procedural metamemory factor. Both declarative factors followed a similar developmental trajectory, increasing steadily from early to late elementary school age, whereas procedural metamemory increased significantly between Grades 1 and 3 only.     

Parents’ Talk About Letters With Their Young Children

A literacy‐related activity that occurs in children's homes—talk about letters in everyday conversations—was examined using data from 50 children who were visited every 4 months between 14 and 50 months. Parents talked about some letters, including those that are common in English words and the first letter of their children's names, especially often. Parents’ focus on the child's initial was especially strong in families of higher socioeconomic status, and the extent to which parents talked about the child's initial during the later sessions of the study was related to the children's kindergarten reading skill. Conversations that included the child's initial were longer than those that did not, and parents presented a variety of information about this letter.